


Welcome to Planet Motherfucker

by Nokomis



Category: Bandom, Mindless Self Indulgence, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Zombies, F/M, Gen, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-02
Updated: 2012-04-02
Packaged: 2017-11-02 22:38:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 34,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/374124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nokomis/pseuds/Nokomis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Twenty years after the first zombie apocalypse, MSI are spreading their message in the underground music scene. When they get to Monroeville they cross paths with their old friends in The Black Parade... and then shit gets real again. Is there any truth to the rumor of a mysterious cure hidden in a nearby government lab? Their lives may depend on the answer!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> [Originally written](http://nokomis305.livejournal.com/233985.html)
> 
> for Bandom Big Bang '09. Thanks to thesamefire and harborshore for beta'ing this. Also, credit for the hand-wavy zombie science goes to the Metallica video for "All Nightmare Long," of all places. Title comes from White Zombie. Rated for gore and minor character death.

“Can I borrow your eyeliner?” Steve asked, elbowing Lyn-Z in the side. She looked at how much she had left and reluctantly handed it over. Steve edged her out of the way and concentrated in the mirror to carefully write “BAIT” across his forehead. 

“You got the B backwards again,” she said. She licked a fingertip and rubbed at it, smearing it until it was almost illegible. Over the dark smear she wrote the _B_ the right way, albeit rather crooked from how Steve crinkled his forehead. “Bastard.”

“You’re just jealous I’m prettier,” Steve said, striking a pose. 

Lyn-Z laughed and flipped him off. “Jimmy, who’s the prettiest of us all?” she called to Jimmy, who was teasing his hair to maximum fluffiness.

He paused mid-tease and said, “Why, Kitty of course.”

“In your faces, bitches,” Kitty said, beaming at them. She straightened her skirt. “Are we ready to do this?”

“Ready as death,” Steve said cheerfully. Lyn-Z grabbed her bass, and they went out on the stage.

The crowd was thinner than the night before, which Lyn-Z took as a sign that they needed to leave town soon. It was too easy to wear out your welcome, and kids dying on their way to the show was a good indicator that the welcome mat was gone.

None of the kids in the audience looked scared. They never did. That was why Lyn-Z loved doing this, why she put everything on the line to play in this fucking band.

She got to look out every night at defiance and anger instead of fear.

Jimmy was in top form, launching into stupid jokes about people’s grandmothers and making fun of the audience, and Lyn-Z couldn’t stop grinning when the audience laughed – bright, real laughter, not the nervous fake-brave bullshit people tended to do in public. 

As always, Jimmy ended the show by mooning the audience and yelling, “Eat this!”

Lyn-Z rolled her eyes as she went backstage – well, the curtained-off partition that signified offstage in the spacious basement under a grocery store they were using as a venue in this town – and playfully hit Jimmy on the back of the head. “You ever gonna mix things up? Maybe find a new finale?”

“Why, when that ending is so socially relevant?” Jimmy replied. 

“And good for finding any of the hungry dead in the audience!” Steve added. 

“Very useful,” Kitty said, nodding seriously before bursting into giggles. “Lyn-Z’s got a point, Jimmy. Maybe that’s why the audience was smaller tonight. They got bored of your scrawny ass.”

“This ass is worth the price of admission,” Jimmy said, twisting to peer over his own shoulder. “More, even. We should up the price.”

“That’s gonna happen,” Kitty said wryly. “We’re barely getting enough to keep this show on the road out of them.”

“And that’s mostly because Steve steals from them,” Lyn-Z said. She finished packing her bass into its case, wiring the broken clasp shut. “So we gonna go mingle? Make some breakfast money, get an idea of what’s going on here?”

“Sounds like a plan,” Steve said.

The audience was already dispersing when they went back out. The kids had already lost a lot of their defiance and snarls and were grouping together, chattering nervously as they glanced at the door.

“Hey,” Lyn-Z said to the first group she came up to. The girls were wearing torn tights, short skirts and were all wearing the same shade of dark red lipstick, which Lyn-Z figured they’d all bought from whatever passed as the black market around here. This town was smaller than most they ended up in. 

“That was so freaking awesome,” one of the girls said, beaming wide.

“Totally worth everything,” another agreed, pushing a choppy strand of straight dark hair behind her ear.

“Everything?” Lyn-Z asked. Usually kids would happily spill what they’d had to go through to get to the show.

“You know,” the first girl said. She lowered her voice. “ _Them_.”

“Oh,” Lyn-Z said. “I’m glad you all made it here safe!”

The girls exchanged glances. The shortest one chomped her gum loudly and said, “Most of us, anyway.”

“They didn’t get any of your friends, did they?” Lyn-Z asked. Usually people clammed up at this point – no one liked to think too much about what went on. Lyn-Z didn’t really blame them. Most nights she wished that she could do the same.

“None of our _friends_ , no,” the dark haired girl said, pursing her lips. “Besides, it wouldn’t be half so fun if there wasn’t that chance, would there? I mean, that’s what this is all about.”

“No,” Lyn-Z said, “It’s not.”

She caught Kitty’s eye across the room, talking to a group of boys with their faces painted like the dead, and shook her head.

She continued mingling with the kids, learning bits and pieces from what they let slip about their lives, and finally slipped out back once the crowd had mostly dispersed. She helped haul the instruments to their compartment under the RV and climbed on, collapsing on the couch, careful to avoid the spring that stuck out as she leaned her head back.

“We should head out of here,” Kitty said as she boarded a few minutes later.

“You got grim vibes too?”

“These kids are sitting on some secrets,” Kitty said. 

Lyn-Z said, “ I think we know what secrets they’re sitting on, and it’s nothing new.”

“What have I said about discussing teenager’s sex lives?” Jimmy said, finally climbing onto the RV with an armful of bags.

“To always include you, always,” Steve recited as he followed Jimmy inside.

“Good thing we weren’t talking about teen sex,” Lyn-Z said. “How was the haul?”

“Moderate,” Steve said, pulling crumpled bills out of his pocket. He piled them on the table in the kitchen segment of the RV. “Looks like enough for gas and food, at the very least, until we get to the next promising town.”

“What about those rumors we were hearing about Monroeville?”

“What, that they’ve got an underground scene there?” Jimmy said. “Please. I think we’re pretty familiar with the kinds of underground _scenes_ these shitty towns all produce. The same fucking kids thinking they’re hot shit because they sneak out after curfew.”

“At least they’re doing that, though,” Kitty said. “Most people are just accepting this shit.”

“As perplexing as that is,” Steve agreed. “What, like do they just wake up every morning all la-di-da the walking dead are fine and dandy?”

“Hell if I know,” Lyn-Z said. She’d given up on trying to figure out why people just accepted the way things were a long time ago. “And those kids back there’d started zombie-baiting. They’re turning into thrill-seekers.”

“So fucked up,” Kitty said, shaking her head. “They don’t even care when their friends die.”

“Defense mechanism,” Jimmy offered, “Or else they think the other kids are as boring as we do.”

Lyn-Z rolled her eyes and stretched her legs out. “We gonna leave soon?”

Kitty nodded. “We scope out anywhere with running water? We all should at least grab a shower before we go, you know how we get better receptions when we don’t smell like _we’re_ the fucking living dead.”

“I got the lock pick,” Jimmy said. “And some quality intel about some pretty sweet locker rooms at the middle school.”

“The kind with the mini-urinals? My favorite,” Steve said. They gathered up clothes that weren’t soaked through with sweat and went to wash the town’s grime off themselves.

*

The worst part about driving from place to place was making the decision between taking the government highways and driving through the forbidden zones.

The forbidden zones had mostly passable roadways and there was far less chance of getting stopped by an official and ending up in some government facility getting questioned, but on the other hand there were no restaurants or gas stations and there was the distinct possibility they’d get eaten.

Lyn-Z still preferred the forbidden zones. It was quieter out there. It wasn’t strictly illegal to be there, which was the only reason they risked it. To write laws saying they weren’t allowed to go there would draw too much attention to them, after all. It would acknowledge the _problem_.

It’d been twenty fucking years since the shit had gone down and there wasn’t a single law on the books that said the word ‘zombie,’ even though everyone knew that was what they were. They were referred to as ‘the infected’ or ‘the enemy,’ but that was it.

And every night that they played, and with every new flood of younger kids coming out, Lyn-Z saw clearer and clearer exactly what was happening.

They were making the kids think it was fucking normal to have corpses come back and attack. Like the fact that so many people had died back then was just another random historical event, lumped in with natural disasters of the past. 

Lyn-Z had just been a kid, but she could remember what things were like before, and she knew exactly how _wrong_ things were now. It still scared her, how few people were left. 

How far apart the towns were. 

How quickly people had adjusted to the way things were now. 

“So are we going to Monroeville?” she asked, leaning over Kitty’s shoulder to look at the map. Monroeville was a relatively populated place – filled with people who couldn’t live in New York anymore, she figured. All the major cities from before had been pretty much unsalvageable after the war. A few further down the south-eastern seaboard had survived, but they hadn’t been anything half the size of New York or Chicago or LA, which had all been decimated.

“Thinking about it,” Kitty said. “I mean, Jimmy’s right, it’ll probably be the same story as everywhere else we’ve tried, but I’m getting sick of the same thing, you know? Even the other bands we’ve come across lately are all the same. Rumor has it Monroeville’s different.”

“I’m just hoping for other people who aren’t afraid to say that it’s fucking scary out there,” Lyn-Z said. “And that the government is too.”

“Well, you can’t blame people for not wanting to get chucked out as zombie-bait,” Steve said, sliding into the booth across from Kitty. Lyn-Z grinned and poked him in the forehead. “Fuck, is that still on me? Good thing the corpses can’t read.”

“You hope,” Lyn-Z teased. 

They debated a little longer, considering going south or maybe even west, where towns were even sparser but the people tended to be more welcoming to a band that operated under the radar and open to new ideas. 

Plus, there tended to be more guns for sale, and, more importantly, ammo.

“Our stockpile is beginning to get low,” Kitty pointed out. “Since last week’s little incident.”

“Honing my shooting skills is an important use of resources,” Steve said.

“Trying to shoot off one of Jimmy’s hair spikes isn’t an important use of resources,” Lyn-Z said. “You know we can’t find another of him easily. It was luck we ended up with him.”

“Luck schmuck,” Jimmy said. “I’m one in a fucking million, bitches, and I choose all of you.” He pointed at each of them dramatically.

Steve rolled his eyes. “Monroeville for a rumor or down south for weapons?”

Lyn-Z said, “It’s not the smart choice, but I still think Monroeville is where we should be. If it’s as booming as they say, then we should be able to find ammo there.”

“What’s your obsession with fucking Monroeville?” Jimmy asked.

Lyn-Z shrugged. “I just don’t think we should give up on there being a bigger underground scene just because so far all we’ve come across have been jackasses.”

“Fair enough,” Steve said. “So we gonna take our asses there the legit way or the exciting way?”

“Exciting,” they all agreed.

*

Two days later Lyn-Z was squatting behind a bush hating whatever stupid impulse had lead them on taking the exciting route, which of course kept them far from the more awesome conveniences of civilization, when she heard a scream.

“Fuck,” she said, hoping the rest of the band had heard it, too, as she jerked her pants up and tried to tell which direction the scream had come from.

She pulled her gun out of her jacket pocket and began to hurry back towards the RV, looking around warily. The scream hadn’t belonged to any of them, she knew, but she still felt the sharp fear that never seemed to abate, no matter how many life and death situations happened to her.

Steve was standing outside the RV holding a rifle, looking around warily. He raised the gun, aiming it at her briefly before lowering it. “That wasn’t you.”

It wasn’t a question.

“Where’s Kitty and Jimmy?” she demanded.

“Kitty’s watching from the bird’s nest,” Steve said, motioning towards the raised part of the RV’s roof where they could aim a rifle out and shoot at all sides. Lyn-Z raised an arm up to say hi, and Steve continued, “Jimmy’s out that way. He hasn’t come back.”

“I’ll go,” Lyn-Z said, and Steve nodded, keeping guard of the RV’s door. They knew from experience that leaving the door unguarded, even with someone inside, could end catastrophically. There was still a stain on the carpet from where they’d lost their previous bassist.

“Watch your ass,” Steve instructed, leering and swatting at her with the butt of his rifle. “We’d have to lower ticket prices without it.”

“Without _me_ , you mean. Asswipe,” she replied, and started jogging in the direction Steve motioned Jimmy had gone off in.

There hadn’t been any more screams, but that didn’t mean shit out here. It was actually a bad sign, she thought. Screaming meant there were things still alive.

They were in a lightly wooded area, and Lyn-Z crept slowly along, keeping an eye on the woods for any unnatural movement, whether that was Jimmy or something else.

It wasn’t exactly silent, though. She could hear grunts and strange moans and she checked to make sure the safety was off on her gun.

As she got closer to the sounds, she realized that some of the grunts were actually a steady stream of cursing. She pushed through a bit of foliage, gun raised.

There was a dead man standing there, brain dripping out a hole in his head, gnawing on a severed arm.

Lyn-Z aimed carefully – it was distracted, no need to waste a bullet being overly hasty – and shot it through the eye. It crumpled to the ground, still clutching the arm in its actually-dead rotted hands, and she surveyed the rest of the scene.

“Motherfucking cock ball sucking shitball!” a petite redhead was yelling, smashing in a zombie’s face with a shovel. “Die fucking fucker!”

“You should hack more at its neck,” Jimmy suggested, stepping closer to her to peer at the damage she was inflicting on the zombie that was twitching on the ground. “Beheading’s always a good way to go.”

“I know how to fucking kill a zombie,” the redhead said testily. “But if you don’t mind, this fucker just helped kill one of my buddies and I want to take out some goddamn rage.”

“Okay, fine!” Jimmy said, stepping back. “Have at it, femme fatale!”

“Fuck you,” she replied, and then continued to bash at the zombie’s head with the blunt side of the shovel. “Die! Die! Die!”

“There only two?” Lyn-Z asked, looking around. She could see a foot sticking out of the underbrush nearby, and she supposed that was the girl’s friend she was currently avenging. 

“There was a third but I got it before Little Miss Thing here went apeshit on this no-longer-walking corpse,” Jimmy said.

Lyn-Z lowered her gun and kept looking around the woods around them. If there were three zombies here, there was the likelihood that there would be more, especially now that the smell of blood was in the air.

Lyn-Z didn’t want to be the one to mention it while the girl was still wailing away on the zombie, which wasn’t even twitching anymore, but they should really do something about her friend before he became a problem too.

“Um, I think it’s dead,” she ventured.

The girl whacked the shovel against the decimated zombie head a few more times for good measure and then straightened up, clutching the shovel and panting. “Of course it’s _dead_ ,” she said. “Jerk face zombie.” She kicked it for good measure.

“I hate to bring it up,” she said, “but we should behead your friend.”

The girl sighed. “Yeah, you’re right. Um. Who are you, anyway?”

“James Euringer, at your service,” Jimmy said, doing a dramatic bow that was only somewhat reduced in elegance by the bloody stick he still had in his hand. “And this is my assistant, Lyn-Z.”

“Assistant?” Lyn-Z asked. She shook her head and then asked the girl, “What are you doing out here?”

“I’m Chantal,” she said, doing a little curtsey towards Jimmy. “And me and Pedro were, um, scavenging.”

She was wearing a striped top and short-shorts, and didn’t seem to have any bags. Lyn-Z seriously doubted her story. 

A feeble moan came from the bushes where Pedro’s body lay, and Chantal cursed. “Guess I should do this,” she said, staring at the gore-encrusted shovel in her hands.

“I can do it if you want,” Jimmy volunteered. Lyn-Z stared at him. He didn’t even volunteer to do a preemptive zombie-killing when it was someone he _liked_ , much less a stranger.

“No,” Chantal said. “I need to.”

They stood there a minute while she took deep breaths. Pedro’s foot began to twitch.

“You’ve got some face on your face,” Jimmy said, reaching out and flicking the bit of zombie-flesh off her cheek. “There you go!”

“Thanks,” Chantal said. She was staring at her friend’s twitching foot. “Fuck, this is harder than I thought.”

“I can do it,” Lyn-Z said. She displayed her gun. She didn’t really want to waste a bullet, but Chantal looked kind of devastated now that she wasn’t in a killing rage.

“No, this is better,” she said. “No chances of re-reanimation.”

She went to the bushes, and Lyn-Z could see her lowering her head and saying something before raising the shovel up and stabbing it down several times. 

“I’ll help you burn it,” Lyn-Z offered, and Chantal nodded. She looked more numb now, like the reality of the past five minutes had set in, and Lyn-Z instructed Jimmy to go back to the RV to let Steve and Kitty know they were alright. The sound of a gunshot would have put them on alert.

There were rituals that were supposed to be observed when burning someone – technically, everyone was supposed to contact the government when someone died, who would take them to the nearest crematorium, but during the worst of the aftermath everyone had gotten used to performing the at-home version – but Lyn-Z didn’t feel right performing them for Chantal’s friend, and Chantal just dug a flask out of the dead man’s pocket and drizzled a shot of whisky over his head before taking one herself.

“Fuck this zombie shit,” she said as Lyn-Z lit the makeshift pyre. Jimmy had returned with Kitty and Steve, who dragged the other zombies a respectful distance away before burning them, too. Steve had darted back with Pedro’s half-eaten arm, sticking it on top of his corpse with a shrugged, “I’d want my bits to go with me instead of the other motherfucker.”

Kitty kept looking up at the black smoke they were producing nervously, knowing it would probably bring undue attention down on them. Lyn-Z caught her eye, and touched Chantal’s arm gingerly. “Do you have somewhere to be?”

Chantal shook her head. “No family left. Most of my friends are on the west coast.”

Most people didn’t tend to travel that far. Lyn-Z tried to not question her as Jimmy said, “If you don’t mind breaking a few laws you can ride with us.”

“If I cared about the stupid fucking laws I wouldn’t have been out here in the first place,” Chantal pointed out. “Let me grab some stuff.”

“What the fuck, dude,” Steve muttered to Jimmy, who was watching Chantal as she jogged off to where her camp presumably had been.

“Got a feeling,” Jimmy shrugged.

“In your pants, no doubt,” Kitty muttered. Jimmy flipped her off wordlessly.

*

When Chantal wasn’t brutalizing zombies, she turned out to be a perky conversationalist, which was actually welcome on the RV. After so many years together they’d all pretty much heard everyone’s stories – and in most cases, lived them too – and Chantal’s interruption to the normal flow of things made Lyn-Z realize just how complacent they had all gotten.

On the other hand, she noticed that Chantal edged away from certain topics, and it took her more than two hours of chatter before she finally asked what they did. It could just be because Chantal was obviously still shell-shocked from her friend’s death, but Lyn-Z didn’t trust strangers easily. There was too great a possibility that they were keeping the wrong sort of secrets.

The wrong sort of secrets could get you killed all too easy. Lyn-Z had seen that too often to ignore.

“We’re nomads,” Steve told Chantal. 

“Troubadours, if you really want to know,” Jimmy said. Lyn-Z glared. It wasn’t that music was illegal, or that being a musician was a crime. But there were strict obscenity and conduct laws that they pretty much fucked right up the ass every night when they got on stage.

Anyone could look at them and know that they weren’t the squeaky clean musicians that the state approved of, and that none of their songs had the music code seal of approval.

“Troubadours,” Chantal repeated, looking at Jimmy skeptically. “You don’t look like you go about singing songs about the might of the empire and how our nation emerged triumphant from the horrific trials we had to endure.”

“You never know,” Jimmy said. “We might.”

Steve snorted.

“We do have a pretty awesome song about the finer aspects of corpse-fucking that I think any of Chaucer’s pilgrims would have appreciated,” Kitty offered from the driver’s seat where she was carefully navigating the RV over the rough roads. The band appeared casual, but Lyn-Z knew they were waiting just as nervously for Chantal’s response as she was. She wasn’t sure what would have to happen if Chantal wasn’t down with this, but she knew it wasn’t good.

“Sounds titillating,” Chantal replied. “So you’re one of those awesome underground bands.”

“Rebels to the end, baby,” Jimmy replied.

“Most excellent,” Chantal said, high-fiving him. Steve let out a sigh of relief that Lyn-Z could practically feel. “Me and Pedro go… used to go to see some of those bands. You aren’t a shitty one, right?”

“Depends on your definition,” Steve replied.

Chantal pursed her lips and looked around. “Nah, I figure you aren’t. I always had a theory that the shitty ones were actually secretly government-sponsored. You know. Make the kids think they’re rebelling but not really.”

Lyn-Z thought Jimmy was going to propose right there, the way he was looking at Chantal. She decided to cut him off before he started in on his theories involving robots and lobotomies. “What do you do?”

Chantal opened her mouth and shut it again. “I’m kind of adrift right now. You know how it is.”

It was pretty much the answer Lyn-Z would expect from someone with secrets. She still felt uneasy about letting Chantal in so quickly. Usually Jimmy was more careful than this, but he was happily questioning Chantal on government conspiracies in the underground music scene and looked like he was in better spirits than he’d been in a while.

Lyn-Z unsteadily made her way to the front passenger seat and sat down, watching the road ahead and gripping the side of her seat every time Kitty swerved to avoid a blackened shell of a car sitting abandoned in the roadway.

“What do you think?” she asked.

Kitty glanced over her shoulder and then shrugged. “She’s definitely keeping things from us,” Kitty said quietly. “But who doesn’t keep secrets these days? She can’t trust us any more than we trust her.”

“Jimmy seems pretty trusting,” Lyn-Z said. 

Kitty grinned. “He’s usually got good instincts. Let’s not get too worried before we have to.”

“Fine, but if she slaughters us in our sleep, I’m gonna gnaw off your arm,” Lyn-Z threatened, grinning.

“Not if I get yours first,” Kitty replied, and they rode on in silence.

*

“I’ve been to Monroeville,” Chantal offered that evening as they found a clear area to park in for the night. “It’s a strange place.”

“Strange how?” Steve asked. Lyn-Z set the extra blanket Chantal was going to make her bed out of down on the table and leaned against the counter.

“I went to a concert there,” Chantal said. “Underground, you know, like I guess you guys do. It was in this warehouse at the edge of town. It got crazy.”

“Good crazy or bad crazy?” Jimmy asked.

“A bit of both, really,” Chantal said. “There were all these kids there, and the band came out in fucking uniforms and did all these songs about death. Just death, not coming back afterwards. It sent a chill down my spine.”

“You think they’re still around?”

“This was a year or two ago,” she said, “so I doubt it. There were a lot of fucking kids there, and the band was flashy. They’re probably long disbanded, but no doubt other bands came after them. You know how kids cling to shit like that.”

Then she seemed to remember what they did. “I mean. Sorry, it’s just, I don’t really get _how_ music is going to change shit.”

“It’s not,” Jimmy said bluntly. “But it’s better than sitting around pretending everything’s okay.”

“There are other ways,” Chantal said.

“But they aren’t as fun,” Steve said.

“Besides, if we can make the kids think about shit, that’ll help,” Lyn-Z said. “Everyone’s too fucking complacent.”

“Everyone’s forgotten the fucking value of life,” Jimmy said. “These little fuckers think all this shit is normal.”

“It might be better that way,” Chantal said. “I mean, maybe things… hurt less, for kiddos who think that life is easy peasy to lose.”

Lyn-Z thought about Pedro twitching on the ground, and shook her head. “Easier isn’t better.”

Not caring about life was worse than not having it, when it came right down to it.

*

Normally on the drive between towns they’d see a handful of zombies, mostly preoccupied with trying to get out of their enclosed vehicles or searching for fresh ready meals, generally not a threat to armed people in a moving vehicle. 

Lyn-Z kind of assumed after the run-in Chantal had, they wouldn’t see any more clusters of the undead for a while. She was wrong.

During the course of their trip to Monroeville they saw increasing numbers of the undead shuffling around in the distance and, in one terrifying instance, popping onto the road just before they smashed into it, causing Jimmy to shriek and put on the windshield wipers, which smeared pus and flesh across the windshield in wide smears that they had to eventually pull over and wash off with an towel that they, by unanimous vote, left on the side of the road.

None of them were willing to vocalize it, but Lyn-Z knew they all thought something was _off_ about the whole thing. She re-checked the ammo stores and thought about suggesting that they forget the Monroeville plan and head south. Bert was probably still in the business of selling shit that blew up and blew heads off, and he knew better than to try and overcharge them.

She didn’t even have to look at the fuel gauge to know that it was a pipe dream, though. They were stuck on this course, no matter how uneasy she was feeling now.

Monroeville looked like every other city Lyn-Z had been to, which by this point was a whole hell of a lot of cities. She wasn’t sure what she had been hoping for. Some obvious sign that this city was the mecca of discontent that she’d always heard would have been nice.

Of course, that would mean that this city would be under even heavier scrutiny, so she understood the need to appear typical. She just wouldn’t trust it until she’d seen hard evidence.

They launched into their typical reconnaissance roles, all going out and talking to people and finding the right place to be at the right time. Jimmy was the best at getting the right info out of people, but Chantal seemed to be throwing him off his game. Lyn-Z and Steve just looked at each other and shook their heads as Jimmy lead Chantal off promising her a good time, and then actually blushing and stuttering a response when Chantal took the opening and teased him.

Kitty ended up having the most success, as Lyn-Z and Steve returned to the RV with little information and bags of food. Kitty grinned wide and informed them that there was going to be an underground concert in one of the abandoned warehouses at the edge of town.

They rechecked their stockpiled food and weapons as they waited for Jimmy and Chantal to return, and kept waiting, and Lyn-Z was ready to agree to Steve’s plan of taking off and leaving the tardy motherfuckers when Jimmy and Chantal returned, flushed and both sporting vivid hickeys on their necks.

“You are damn lucky _someone_ is on the ball,” Kitty informed them severely.

“Oh, _someone_ was,” Jimmy replied, and Chantal playfully hit him. They launched into a fake-battle, and Steve found a towel to snap at them, declaring himself the defender of decency. 

*

The warehouse district was pushed right up against the city’s defensive fence and on occasion the headlights would shine through gaps to reveal movement.

“Are there really zombies that close out there?” Kitty asked, leaning forward as if that would give her a better look.

“They kept the side of town we came in on clear,” Lyn-Z said. “You’d think they’d do the same for the whole perimeter.”

“It is a big town.” Jimmy waggled his fingers. “And you know how they’re attracted by loud noise.”

That was the story the government gave as the official reason that concerts were illegal, as if the fences keeping towns from being infested with the dead weren’t enough. Lyn-Z knew that minor invasions still happened with some regularity, especially when flocks of zombies from the forbidden zones stumbled across a city, but she’d never seen it firsthand. Most of her battle experience had come from their tendency to travel through the forbidden zones, and accidentally coming across tiny pockets of the undead who had slipped through the eradication processes.

They drove slowly around the blocks where the warehouse was located, and there were enough kids milling around, hiding cigarettes behind their backs and ducking into doorways when they saw the RV’s headlights, that they knew they were in the right place.

They made it inside, pushing their way through the crowds with the ease of practice.

The band onstage was familiar, though their uniforms weren’t. The drum kit read “The Black Parade,” and Lyn-Z remembered playing a few shows with them years ago, when the lead singer had been chubby-cheeked and falling-over-drunk, excited to be on the stage.

Now he stood ramrod straight in front of the crowd, his black and white uniform giving him something like authority as he smirked at the crowd. 

“Amazing what a few years can do,” Jimmy said. “He’s not telling them to put their hands up anymore.”

“Looks like they got a new drummer, too,” Kitty said. The songs they were singing were about dying and staying dead, and it was creepy enough that Lyn-Z hugged herself, wondering how they’d managed to avoid getting shut down.

The uniforms alone should have been enough to draw unwanted attention.

“He’s whipping those kids into a frenzy,” Kitty observed.

“He’s whipping my _funny bone_ into a frenzy,” Steve said. “What the fucking fuck is he doing up there?”

Gerard – that was what he was named, Gerard, Lyn-Z remembered sharing a beer with him and laughing at how pink his cheeks would get when she teased him – seemed to have taken a few cues from Vaudeville. The campiness of his performance only seemed to emphasize the seriousness that the whole band seemed to have come into over the last few years, and Lyn-Z half-wondered if they were really the same band.

The songs continued. There was a definite theme of death to them, but not a single mention of zombies or the undead. Instead it focused on loss and the spirit’s journey, and that more than anything struck home how rare it was to hear about death without the context of the aftermath for the flesh.

They’d all been told a million times that the undead were no longer their loved ones, but for the first time in a long while Lyn-Z began to think about what actually happened to people when they died. 

It was frightening that something so basic no longer occurred to her when she saw the dead so frequently.

“I’m gonna go get a drink,” Lyn-Z told Steve, then pushed her way to where the crowd thinned in the back of the warehouse. She bought a beer that had been brewed by someone who actually had an idea of what they were doing, unlike most the swill served in places like this, and sipped it slowly, leaning against the back wall and scuffing the toe of her boot against the concrete floor.

She wasn’t sure why this band’s message was hitting her so hard. It wasn’t like her own wasn’t socially conscious, and their debates about life versus death had touched on much deeper points than simply the fact that people who died were _dead_ , no matter what their corpse did afterward, and yet she felt unsettled.

She thought of Chantal beheading her best friend just a few days ago, and how she was now laughing and dancing. Weariness settled in like a weight around her neck.

She’d just finished the last sip of her beer when Jimmy appeared at her side, poking her in the ribs and saying, “Come on, we’re going out with the band.”

“Aren’t we out?” Lyn-Z said.

“The Black Parade,” Jimmy corrected. “Fuckers rock-ignized my hair. Invited us to hang out and catch up.” He pulled at her arm. “Let’s schmooze.”

Jimmy _never_ wanted to schmooze, so she figured that there’d been an offer of food somewhere in the invitation. _Good_ food. She offered up her arm for Jimmy to gallantly take.

*

Good food, it turned out, was actually _really fucking_ good food. Lyn-Z was on her second plate of lasagna, and she didn’t even care about the ribbing Steve was giving her over it. It turned out that schmoozing meant hanging out at the house of a guy named Brian and eating enough food to feed an army while getting not-so-subtly interrogated on what was going on in the world. For right now, though, Lyn-Z was fine with that.

“This is really fucking good,” she announced to no one in particular, taking another bite.

“Frankie’s mom made it,” came a man’s voice, right in her hear, close like a whisper.

Lyn-Z jumped, stabbing herself in the lip with her fork. She jerked her head to the right, and there was the skinny glasses-wearing member of the Black Parade leaning over her shoulder, looking at her expectantly.

“Christ, don’t sneak up on a girl like that,” she said. She touched her lip, but it was just stinging, not bleeding. “You’re a hazard.”

“Sorry,” he said, sounding supremely unconcerned. He pointed at her arm. “Is that a black cat?”

“Bad luck, good luck,” she said, looking at her arm and actually seeing her tattoos for the first time in a long while. “Hoping to cancel it all out.”

“Most people wouldn’t want to cancel out good luck,” he said.

“Moderation in all things,” she said. She set down her fork and half-turned, sticking out her hand. “I’m Lyn-Z.”

“Mikey Way,” he said. The full name came out in a casual jumble, like he would never think to just use his first name. He pulled out the nearest chair and sat down. Lyn-Z would normally make a comment about making himself welcome, but she didn’t know these people, didn’t know this house. “We’ve met, you know.”

“That was a lotta corpses ago,” she said, grinning at him. He didn’t seem pissed that she didn’t remember him. 

“Ain’t that the truth,” Steve announced, from Lyn-Z’s other side, not seeming to even notice that he was butting into a conversation. Lyn-Z kicked him lightly under the table to remind him of manners. “And I’m Steve.”

“Right,” Mikey said.

“So what’s up with the goofy-ass uniforms?” Steve said. “Trying to trick kids by using their blind allegiance to authority?”

“What kids have you been around lately?” Mikey asked. “And it’s Gerard’s idea. He thinks if we set ourselves apart from the crowd, the crowd’s more apt to pay attention to what we say. And it’s part of his vision.”

There was unabashed pride in Mikey’s voice, and it made Lyn-Z miss her own sister with a surprisingly sharp pang. 

She tried not to think of home too much. The road and the stage was her home now.

“Still make you look like assholes,” Steve said. 

Mikey looked at Steve, whose hair was standing up in odd clumps and had what he’d explained to Lyn-Z was meant to be muttonchops drawn on his cheeks in blue, and raised an eyebrow.

“Touche,” Steve acquiesced. He did a half-bow and said, “Want a new drink, Zoid?”

“I’m good,” Lyn-Z said, and after he’d gone to join the group clustered around the bucket of ice, she asked Mikey, “Why did you change?”

“Our look?” Mikey said guilelessly.

“I think you’ve all changed more than that.”

Mikey shrugged, emphasizing how his shoulders slumped, and said, “We had some bad times. Not any worse than anyone else, but to us…”

“What happened?”

“An attack,” Mikey said simply. “Not even a particularly bad one, but Otter – our drummer – didn’t make it. And it wasn’t long after that, me and Gee’s grandma passed. It made us… it made us reevaluate some things, you know?”

“Yeah,” Lyn-Z said. She was a little ashamed that she’d pried, because it was obvious the wounds were still raw, but it answered a lot about why they’d changed so much.

She wondered how she’d changed. She couldn’t see it herself, and her band had shifted and changed with her. Across the room she could see Jimmy pull Chantal onto his lap and kiss her neck playfully.

Maybe she could see the changes in them after all. The Black Parade might have gotten more serious, but she thought maybe her band had gotten less angry.

She wasn’t sure that was a good thing, not in the world they were living in.

After she finished her food, she ended up in the living room. Mikey gave her a crash course on everyone’s names before he wandered off so he could talk to Frank. They glanced back at her, and she wondered for the first time why Mikey had approached her.

He hadn’t been flirting, more… gauging what he thought of her.

She settled down on the couch on the empty cushion between Kitty and Gerard, and gave him a small smile of greeting before blinking a few times when the topic of conversation around them became clear.

Matt Cortez seemed to be regaling them all with a tale of an undead brothel he’d come across somewhere.

Jimmy looked delighted, like he’d just been handed a gift he hadn’t been expecting. Lyn-Z supposed she was going to have to hear undead hooker jokes on a nightly basis now. 

“They had ‘em chained to the wall, teeth removed so it was safe,” Matt said. “No fuckin’ gag reflex, can you believe it? Except I got one of the bargain bin specials, and when I told her to go down, she didn’t have the stomach for it.”

“I can’t believe you’d participate in that sort of depravity,” Gerard said primly. He waved his hands around when he talked, and his hand brushed against hers as he settled it down on his lap. It sent a shiver of attraction through her body, and she spent a moment staring at her hand trying to remember if she’d felt that when they’d met before. She suspected not, she would have remembered him more clearly.

“I just said it didn’t happen,” Matt replied. “And besides, it was pretty equal opportunity. I think they had some deal where you do some sort of pre-mort agreement. Sell your own corpse and get the cash up front. Pretty sweet fucking deal.”

“How much?” Jimmy asked speculatively.

“You don’t get to whore yourself out!” Chantal said. She contemplated the idea a moment. “Do they have couples rates?”

“I didn’t ask,” Matt said, amused.

“Planning on a murder-suicide?” Jimmy teased Chantal.

“Well, I assumed you’d be dying of heartbreak from my own death,” Chantal said cheerfully. “That’s true love.”

Jimmy rolled his eyes and they both burst into laughter.

Gerard fidgeted. Lyn-Z glanced at him out of the corner of her eye; he seemed to be having trouble not saying something. It was kind of adorable, watching him keep opening his mouth and then shutting it abruptly, as if remembering he’d been shushed once already. She felt hyper-aware of him now, of his warmth against the line of her body.

Kitty asked, “How do you even end up inside an undead brothel? I’ve never actually seen one.”

“Just lucky, I guess,” Matt said. 

The conversation shifted to comparing the strangest life-threatening situations various people had gotten into, and while Jimmy jumped in with the story about the time he’d fought of a skeleton in a Nazi helmet, Lyn-Z turned to Gerard. “Feel strongly about zombie suffrage?”

Gerard looked very close to sticking his tongue out, then said, “Well, I don’t want them to _vote_. It just seems cruel.”

Lyn-Z shrugged. “So’s life.”

 

*

Kitty gave her a sideways glance when she saw that Lyn-Z had put on her stage clothes – short plaid skirt, knee socks, heavy shit-kicker boots – to go to the show. “Dressed to impress?”

“Shut up,” Lyn-Z said, readjusting the buckle on the gun holster it had long since become second nature to wear. She pulled on her leather jacket, self-consciously rubbing at some of the scuffs before realizing what she was doing. 

“He doesn’t care how you’re dressed,” Kitty said.

“Seriously, shut up,” Lyn-Z replied. She’d been spending some time with Gerard, sure, but that wasn’t why she was dressing up. She was just itching to play another show, and wearing her uniform helped, in a way. At the very least it gave her the sort of confidence she associated with the roar of an audience.

“What, is Lyn-Z trying to impress Romeo ?” Steve asked as he walked through, glancing down at her skirt. “Them gams’ll do it.”

“Fuck you all,” Lyn-Z said, sticking her tongue out at them. “Let’s just go already.”

They left the RV, and Lyn-Z stopped short when she stepped off it, hearing the way that the undead’s moans echoed through the mostly-empty streets.

“There are more of them,” Kitty said unnecessarily, hugging herself. Lyn-Z figured that under her jacket she was stroking the .22 she carried for comfort. She didn’t blame her; it was all she could do to not draw her own gun.

“A butt load more,” Chantal agreed, wrapping her arm around Jimmy’s waist.

Lyn-Z chewed on her lip. There hadn’t been a major uprising in a populated area in over two years, but she still felt the bone-deep chill of terror at the way the zombie’s distinctive, guttural moans filled the darkened streets. This far out, there weren’t any streetlights, nothing to draw attention to the people except for the illegal concert itself, but still the zombies were there, letting their presence be known.

They made it to the warehouse without incident, and followed the trickle of kids through the maze of rusting fair rides – there had been little use for Ferris wheels and tilt-a-whirls in the world after the shit had gone down, but someone had apparently decided it was worth saving rather than dumping out in the forbidden zones – to the wide, grated-metal staircase that lead to the basement where a stage and sound equipment had been rigged up.

The last show seemed a faint memory, and any comfort familiarity should have brought was gone. All Lyn-Z felt was hemmed-in, like at any time the undead would stream down the stairs and down the old ventilation system and attack, destroying and reanimating all the kids until the bloodbath turned into a seething mass of undead flesh groping for something, anything living.

Lyn-Z hung back once they got to the crowd, where a kid had set up an old stereo and was playing a bootleg copy of an album from before, something riotous and loud that Lyn-Z didn’t recognize, distorted and static-filled as it was, but the crowd was getting into it anyway, cutting loose from the tension of day-to-day life of constant fear.

Jimmy and Chantal immediately joined the fray, dancing at the edge of the crowd, laughing and doing twirls, bright against the dark, angry mass.

Kitty slid off to the side, going towards the stage. Lyn-Z had heard her asking about the tech set-up, and Lyn-Z figured she was off to find out more tricks to add to their own arsenal. 

Lyn-Z picked at her tights, tugging at a loose thread on her thigh as she looked around. Her outfit wasn’t working anymore; she just felt scared and unprepared and underdressed to boot. She bit her lip when Steve when he prodded her, asking her if she was okay. “I have a bad feeling,” she said. “Outside… that was fucking weird.”

“Sometimes they come near the towns,” Steve shrugged. “That’s what the big fucking fence is for.”

“But… how are there that _many_?” Lyn-Z said. “That’s what’s bothering me. There’s a fucking horde out there, and you never see those in this part of the country any more. Not after the eradication.”

“Come on, Zoid, it’ll be okay,” Steve said, pulling her in close for a quick hug. “Let’s get out there and beat the shit out of some kids so you’ll stop fretting about the undead hoards knocking at our gates.”

Lyn-Z shook her head. Joining the pit would just increase her feeling of claustrophobia, and feeling bodies all around her, even hot, sweaty ones, would just make her jumpy.

She was seriously considering just going back to the RV, but the thought of walking alone through those streets with all the moans and groans of the dead echoing between abandoned buildings sent a chill up her spine, the likes of which she hadn’t felt in years.

Too fucking many of them, she thought again. It was all _wrong_ out there and no one else seemed to even fucking care. 

She took a deep breath and then hurried back up the stairs, taking a left and going deeper into the warehouse, looking around the dusty, rusting relics of a time when people chose to be terrified for fun. She trailed her fingertips along the outside shell of a tilt-a-whirl seat and remembered riding in one as a little girl, shrieking and laughing at the way fear and dizziness sent adrenaline and excitement through her limbs and settled uncomfortably in her stomach.

She had just taken another few steps when the creaking groan of un-oiled metal parts moving made her shriek, sounding not unlike her younger self.

“Oh fuck, sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you!” 

Lyn-Z clamped her hand over her mouth and slowly realized she could make out Gerard’s pale face and the few bold white stripes on his outfit. She moved closer, and her eyes adjusted enough to see him more clearly. He was sitting in the tilt-a-whirl seat, tucked in the corner with his feet pulled up, tapping an unlit cigarette on his shoe. His hand was still resting on the safety bar, and Lyn-Z realized that he had pushed it forward. That explained the noise.

She lowered her hand off her mouth and said, “You didn’t. Much.”

He grins crookedly and pats the seat next to him. “Join me?”

She shook her head. “Don’t you have a show to do?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I was just thinking.”

She shifted her weight. “I usually try my hardest to _not_ think before these things. Messes with the spontaneity.”

“Not really the spontaneity I’m worried about.” He lifted the cigarette to his mouth, then lowered it again. 

“Need a light?”

Gerard shook his head. “Not this close before the show.” He looked around. “Did you go to carnivals as a kid?”

Lyn-Z leaned against the safety bar, resting her chin on her hands. “I loved them. It was nice, being scared in a safe way.”

“That’s what I’m doing now,” Gerard said, motioning towards his outfit. “What we do. We’re just a fucking carnival ride for these kids. We don’t change anything.”

“You did call your band the Black Parade,” Lyn-Z said. “This can’t be a revelation.”

“I always thought it would be more… awe-inspiring,” Gerard said. “Epic, you know? Like superheroes used to be.”

“Most kids push superheroes into the same box as carnival rides eventually,” Lyn-Z said. “But some of them never do. We didn’t.”

Gerard grinned, and started to say, “That’s cuz we’re--” but was interrupted by a, “Where the fuck are you, Gee?” echoing through the warehouse.

Lyn-Z laughed at how quickly Gerard stood up, nearly hitting his head on the curve of the tilt-a-whirl’s shell. “Here, Mikey!” he called, shoving the cigarette into his pocket.

“Your audience awaits,” she told him, kicking her foot absently against the railing absently, enjoying the dull sound it made. “Ready to be rode?”

“Do you two need a moment?” Mikey Way stepped around a giant tea cup and saucer that was turned up on its side, looking as though it was spilling a shadow on the dusty floor.

Lyn-Z laughed as Gerard hid his face in his hands. “I think we’re good, thanks.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Gerard mumbled, stepping off the ride and glaring at his brother. “Time to go on?”

“Time to rock some faces off, definitely,” Mikey replied. There were cobwebs caught on the shoulder of his uniform. She wondered where he’d thought Gerard was hiding.

Lyn-Z followed them back into the basement, grinning stupidly at the way they kept elbowing each other like she couldn’t see them.

*

She found Steve once she got back into the crowd, which was considerably larger now – older faces filling in the gaps between teenagers with sharp-toothed grins, scarred and grizzled and looking like warriors. He beamed when he saw her and said, “Someone’s in better spirits,” reaching out and tugging at her hair.

“You look like you’ve _found_ some spirits,” she replied, swatting his hand away.

“The dudes in the bandanas over there have their own still,” Steve said cheerfully. “I gave them insider info on how curfew is enforced here for some moonshine.”

“You don’t have that insider info,” Lyn-Z said, crinkling her nose at him. “Guess we’re planning on getting the hell out of dodge?”

“Sooner rather than later,” Steve said, and Lyn-Z tried to ignore the pit in her stomach at the thought of leaving. “There’s not a lot for us to do here.”

“I dunno, seems pretty active,” she said.

“Exactly,” Steve said.

Cortez darted out and turned off the stereo perched on the edge of the stage, and started hooking instruments up to the hodgepodge of amps and speakers. He handled the tangle of wires with the ease of practice. Then the Black Parade came out in a solemn line, Gerard taking the center spot and taking command of the crowd immediately.

Under the bright shine of a rigged-up searchlight, he looked like a completely different man than he had upstairs, curled up in the corner of the seat like he’d been hiding from the universe. Now he commanded it, and Lyn-Z was strangely proud of how the crowd reacted to him. They cheered and seemed to sway as one, transformed from a collection of individuals into a cohesive whole, an audience completely eager to hear Gerard’s words. The crowd seemed to anticipate what was happening, and she realized that they’d probably built up this following slowly but surely. It wasn’t unlike what her band did, only the Black Parade were on the equivalent of their home field, and the crowd reflected that.

Standing apart from the crowd, she could understand what the government was so afraid of. The power of music and ideas was a potent force, especially when hope was so scarce. 

This was what it was like to be on the other side of the curtains, to fall under the spell of music and ideas and rebellion. It’d been a while since she’d experienced it, and she remembered the girls, giddy-bright, at her own band’s show what now felt like eons ago.

 _This_ was why they kept coming. Lyn-Z didn’t blame them.


	2. Chapter 2

Lyn-Z worked her way to the edge of the stage and when the band filed back off into the darkness, she slipped off into it after them, hoping she’d interpreted Gerard correctly. Otherwise, she thought wryly, she was going to be more than a little humiliated.

He grinned at her, though, and she told him that the show had been awesome.

There seemed to be a labyrinth of rooms that the stage was blocking off from the rest of the basement, and Lyn-Z trailed after the band through the maze. They seemed to be using one of the cleaner rooms as a dressing room, and Gerard waved to his band, who grinned and catcalled after them, as he lead her down a narrow hallway and up a flight of stairs.

She hadn’t realized how stuffy and hot the basement had been until they were outside, and she took a few deep breaths of the cool air. Gerard fanned the neck of his t-shirt, but didn’t take off his jacket. Lyn-Z laughed at him.

“If you’re trying to be inconspicuous that jacket’s a pretty much dead giveaway of what you spend your nights doing, Elvis,” Lyn-Z teased.

Gerard made a face at her. “I just don’t like going out with my arms unprotected. I had a close call when I was a kid.”

“Oh,” Lyn-Z said, feeling like an ass. Their generation had had it worst – they’d been old enough to realize what was happening when the dead started crawling out of the ground, but too young to really _do_ anything about it but watch people they knew die and come back.

She didn’t mean to lead them away from the warehouse, but she’d always been the sort that got filled with nervous energy she had to burn _somehow_ , so she started walking, and Gerard joined her.

“It wasn’t that big a deal, really, compared to the shit some people went through, but it was enough for me,” Gerard said. “I can just remember hunching down in this drain pipe, keeping Mikey shoved behind me so he’d be safe, and this thing just trying its damndest to get to me. My momma took it out before it could get a taste of me, but I dreamed about it for years. “

“Sounds like you’re still obsessed with it,” Lyn-Z said, “judging from your songs.”

“Well, we can’t all sing songs about fucking kid-zombies,” Gerard replied.

“That is a very classy tune, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lyn-Z shot back.

They keep walking, becoming increasingly aware of how strangely the zombies are behaving.

“They’re getting bolder,” Gerard said, watching the decaying arms wave through the gaps in the fence. Lyn-Z didn’t move any closer. She’d never been one to tease zombies, and the fact that they were close enough that she could smell them –she’d never gotten used to the strange scent, the way reanimated decaying tissue didn’t stink the way it should, but instead had a certain mustiness to it. She could remember watching an old black-and-white movie about mummies when she was a little kid, and the way zombies smelled always reminded her of that, of dirt and things long locked away.

“Why shouldn’t they be?” she said. “The people they used to be were comfortable in the cities. That’s where everything is.”

Gerard gave her a sideways glance. “Do you think that they retain knowledge?”

Lyn-Z bit her lip. This was something she’d never really talked about out loud, not since she was a kid and her mother has shushed her when the topic came up. It was hard to get past the self-imposed block. “I don’t know. It’s just… it’s not that they act like the people they were. They’re dead. It’s just, what’s ingrained human habit and what’s instinct? It’s hard to tell.”

Gerard blinked and looked directly at her, ignoring the zombies. “That’s it exactly! They used to be _people_ , and in our rush to forget that so we can live with the world, we started ignoring the importance of that. “

“That’s why I do this shit,” Lyn-Z said. “Why I started, anyway. Not just because it’s fun and because we’re sticking it to the fucking man. Because why shouldn’t we point out what’s important?”

The gate the zombies were pushing against groaned. Lyn-Z didn’t like the way that it was swaying or the ominous creaking of the joints as the weight of the zombies surged against it again and again, like waves against the shore.

“I think we should go back,” she said, suddenly remembering her earlier dread with brilliant clarity. She looked around: the street they were on was wide and relatively free from debris, but she could spy a few alleys nearby that could serve as shelter if the need arose.

“I agree,” Gerard said, looking at the swaying fence with trepidation. “I’ve never seen it move like that.”

They turned and started walking quickly towards the warehouse when there was a loud _crack_. Lyn-Z broke into a run instinctively, and Gerard reached out and grabbed her hand as they raced for an alley. They were too close to the fence; there was no way they’d get back to the warehouse without being swarmed. Their only chance was to get somewhere they could defend themselves and hope that the zombies didn’t follow them.

It wasn’t the best survival plan, but Lyn-Z didn’t have time for anything else. 

It was only when she had the security of knowing Gerard wouldn’t let her run in the wrong direction that she dared glance back over her shoulder. She immediately regretted it.

The fence had broken, all right. Somehow the supports – which purportedly ran six feet underground, a number which had lead to hundreds of jokes that Lyn-Z suddenly couldn’t remember the punch lines to– had bent, and the fence had, rather than busting, simply folded inward, leading to a confused group of zombies struggling to cross it, climbing carelessly over the flailing bodies of the zombies whose arms were smashed through and under the fence.

None of the alarms or flashing lights that they had all been assured would go off when the fence was disturbed were doing a damn thing, and in the dim lights set every so often down the length of the fence to warn people of its existence Lyn-Z could make out the undead stumbling to their feet and wobbling into the supposed safe zone of town.

“Fuck!” she said, turning her head away from the chaos and trying to focus on getting to the alley. “Oh my fuck!”

They reached the alley and Gerard had bright red spots high on his cheeks from the exertion so soon after his performance, but he looked shaky and terrified. “That’s a lot of fucking zombies,” he said breathlessly, looking around and finding a empty wooden crate that he started shoving towards the mouth of the alley. “We need to build a fucking wall.”

“One that won’t crumple like a goddamn house of cards,” Lyn-Z agreed, shoving another crate to join Gerard’s. She paused long enough to realize that the zombies were definitely coming, slow and sluggish though they might be, and that it was extremely fucking doubtful they’d have time to build a zombie-proof wall. She looked around, but there wasn’t any escape – the alley they’d ended up in didn’t even have a fucking fire escape, it was just filled with debris from years of neglect and abuse.

She moved quicker, shoving stuff towards the mouth of the alley, but even with Gerard matching her crate for crate they only had a pile of clutter, not anything that could be considered a proper defense.

“How many _are_ there?” Gerard asked shakily.

“Too goddamn many?” Lyn-Z answered, looking back into the alley. It wasn’t a dead end, thank whatever mercy there was left in the world, but she still felt like she was trapped.

It was the same feeling as she’d felt earlier in the warehouse basement, she realized, only amplified a hundredfold, so that her hands were shaking and her knees were locked. 

“I didn’t see where the fence was still intact,” Gerard continued. “Just… _them_.”

Lyn-Z took out her gun, and Gerard seemed to shake himself into scrounging around, looking for a likely weapon. He found a metal pole with a jagged, sharp end, and took a few practice jabs with it. Lyn-Z quickly saw the problem with bare sweaty hands gripping a metal pole, and untied a scrap of striped cloth and her red bandana from her own outfit and offered them to him to wrap his hands in.

“Thanks,” he said, and the tingles that ran up her arm when his hand brushed hers overrode even the gut-clenching fear that they were both going to die a gruesome death.

There were two zombies now at the mouth of the alley clumsily climbing over the crates she and Gerard had shoved in the way, but Lyn-Z held off on firing her gun. That would only attract more, she knew, and she wasn’t ready for a swarm.

So far the two zombies seemed to be the only ones who had caught their scent, or whatever the hell sense that zombies hunted with. It was disheartening how little they still knew about the undead and how they functioned as beings, but Lyn-Z supposed that no one had ever really wanted to study them.

The best thing to do with them was kill them, after all. 

She found her own weapon, an old street sign that looked as though someone had cut it off for the sole purpose of using as an improvised axe, since she realized the gun wasn’t practical right now – too much danger of attracting more attention – and took a few practice swings.

“The only good zombie is a dead zombie,” she said aloud, and Gerard let out a sharp honking laugh.

“Ready?” he said, and Lyn-Z nodded.

Gerard stepped up and took down the first zombie – figured that he’d be a gentleman – and Lyn-Z watched his back, making sure the second zombie didn’t get too close. He was a little hesitant, whacking at the zombie instead of shoving the pipe straight through its skull like Lyn-Z would have done, but after the zombie made an attempt to grab on to his arm he seemed to get a surge of aggression and drove the pipe straight through its empty left eye socket. 

She didn’t consider herself a squeamish person, but the sound that zombie heads made when punctured felt like fingernails on a chalkboard to her, something that sent a visceral shiver through her body. 

She kept her weapon at the ready, though, watching the second zombie lurch closer, seemingly unaware that its partner in crime had just given up the ghost. Gerard rested a foot on his zombie’s chest to pull out the pipe with a loud _squelch_ , and Lyn-Z took the opportunity to step forward and swing her street sign over her head, cutting down like she was chopping firewood. The sign lodged into the second zombie’s head, and it fell to its bony knees as she raised a foot up, rested a boot on its shoulder and kicked hard, jerking her makeshift axe out of its collapsed skull.

She looked back up at Gerard, holding his pipe – now with bits of skull and gloopy brain matter clinging to one end – loosely in both hands as she rested her sign on her shoulder. 

The sound of their minor skirmish had attracted the attention of a few other zombies who were splitting from the main hoard to lurch haltingly towards them.

“Fuck me backwards,” Lyn-Z said, taking a deep breath. She was really fucking regretting her choice of outfit. Intellectually she knew that zombies could bite through denim just as easily as they could gnaw on bare flesh, but there was something about wearing pants that added a level of security that a skirt just lacked.

Gerard was staring at the zombies like he’d never quite seen a swarm so big. He chewed anxiously on his lip as he sized them up, then said, “Let’s take as many of these fuckers down as we can.”

Lyn-Z pretended to not hear the nervousness in his voice. “With extreme prejudice,” she agreed, hoisting her makeshift axe into position again. She was really glad she’d worn the fingerless gloves now; at least she’d made one fashion move right.

“And we’re both gonna survive so we can get back and check on our bands,” Gerard said. 

She hadn’t known him all that long, but she still understood what he wasn’t saying. “They’re kicking way more ass than we are right now.”

Gerard nodded tightly. 

The new wave of zombies was crawling over the actually-dead. 

“And we’ll get through this,” she said. “Just keep swinging.”

She had always lead by example, so she took a stride forward and swung her makeshift axe like a baseball bat, catching the leading zombie in the neck. Zombies were more fragile than humans, really, given how easy it was to slice through bloated, decaying flesh; the problem was that without pain or brain function the fuckers just wouldn’t _stop_ , even when their heads were half-hanging off their necks.

She bashed it in the head with the sign this time, knowing that the only way to get it to really, truly _die_ was to destroy the brain.

One day she hoped someone would explain just why the fuck destroying the brain of something that didn’t have brain function killed it; until then she would just be glad that the bastards had an off switch.

By the third zombie Lyn-Z had started moving on instinct, the world narrowing down to the alley in front of her. She evaluated the threat of each zombie as they shuffled towards her, tripping and crawling over their defeated brethren as she hacked at them with the sign. She was growing to appreciate her makeshift axe more and more with every swing. 

Gerard worked alongside her, letting out a steady stream of obscenities and taunts at the undead as he smashed their heads in. Lyn-Z found the flow of words coming from him soothing as background noise to the sound of her own heartbeat pulsing loudly in her ears and the steady ragged sound of her own breath as she fought. They’d fallen into teamwork easily. Quickly. It was probably what was saving their lives.

She seemed to be registering things in images: a spray of greenish fluid bursting from a popped, bloated belly; a dark smear gleaming dully on her sleeve when the perimeter light hit it right; an eyeball that had been hanging by a nerve getting severed as she swung her makeshift axe and landing on her boot with a strange plop; Gerard snarling as he swung his pipe again and again at a strangely fresh-looking zombie; a stringy, bloody clump of hair and scalp trailing off the edge of her sign like streamers on a bicycle. 

Her swings were getting sloppier and there was a burning in her arms that meant that sooner rather than later she was going to have trouble, and she slowly realized that the trickle of zombies was slowly turning into a flood, and if they continue to make their stand they were both going to end up part of the fucking problem.

“Gerard!” she yelled, knowing better than to approach him, knowing she would get a face-full of lead pipe for her trouble. He had the look of someone lost in the comforting violent motions of killing and destroying the monsters, and she was too soon out of the same mode herself to underestimate how it can reduce the world down to you versus everything in it.

She swung again, hitting a zombie that looked like it had once been someone’s granny, and yelled at him again.

This time Gerard looked up, startled, and she said, “We’re fucked if we stay.”

She nodded towards the other end of the alley, and Gerard gave the zombie at his feet one more whack before nodding back and starting to run towards what she hoped was freedom. She kept her makeshift axe gripped tight in her left hand, but fumbled under her jacket for her gun as she ran.

Keeping quiet was no longer a consideration; it was really fucking obvious that Monroeville was overrun. At least, the part they were in, and right now that was all that mattered. 

The alley let out into another side street that had the undead milling up and down it, and Lyn-Z realized how lucky they’d been that they hadn’t gotten trapped in that alley. That nothing had snuck up behind them and taken a chomp out of them before they’d even realized the threat.

“Over there!” Gerard gasped, voice hoarse as he pointed towards another alley, even smaller than the one they’d just emerged from. She followed him across the street into the alley, fear making her run fast enough that she felt like her feet were barely touching the ground.

They both knew how to kill zombies; everyone got a hard lesson in it 20 years ago and no one had been given the luxury of forgetting it. Lyn-Z was thankful for that, she had a feeling it was the only reason they were both still alive.

So they knew when to fight and they knew when to retreat, and now was the time for them to save themselves first. There was blood dripping into Lyn-Z's eyes and she was elbow deep in corpse goo and when she closed her eyes she could still see flashes of Gerard bashing in a zombie's head with a pole.

They escaped off to another side alley, away from the major flow of zombies - they aren't fucking heroes, they just want to save their own asses and hope everyone else did the same, it would be suicide to try to take them all - and Lyn-Z shot the few zombies that crept their way.

There was less chance of them getting overtaken here, that was the only reason why she risked the gunshots. 

The few twitching corpses at the mouth of their tiny alley seemed enough to deter the dead, convinced them there was nothing alive here, and they both stood there, catching their breath and keeping a wary eye as the worst of the riot of zombies passed.

Her fingers felt gummy and strange, and when Lyn-Z looked at her hands in disgust she saw how much corpse goo was drying on them. She wiped them off on her t-shirt as best as she could, taking deep breaths and checking her gun to make sure nothing was blocking the barrel. Gerard was just standing there, hands loose at his sides. Something dark and viscous was dripping down his forehead from his hair and there were bits of stuff she could only think of as _goo_ splattered on him.

He slowly leaned his pole against the wall, and Lyn-Z let her gun-hand drop and trigger-finger loosen. She stared at him, wide-eyed, breathing hard. There was blood dripping down his neck to make a dark wet stain on the neck of his shirt. 

It felt like her blood was on fire in her veins, like if she didn’t keep moving, keep fighting, she was going to _explode_.

“You bit?" he asked, voice rough. He'd been yelling, she remembered, screaming obscenities at the zombies as he killed them. 

"No," she replied, almost before she'd checked to make sure. “You?"

He shook his head, making his hair flop down in his eyes. She stepped closer, pushed the hair away, feeling how sticky with... something... it was. 

"Good," she said as she pressed her lips to his, pushed against his chest so that he stepped backwards until he was pressed against the spray-painted cinderblock wall.

He didn't kiss back at first, and it took Lyn-Z a minute to realize this. She stopped and pulled back, but then Gerard seemed to unfreeze and he reached up and placed a hand on the back of her head, pulling her back in for a real kiss, messy and wet and desperate.

Lyn-Z let out a tiny moan into Gerard's mouth, one hand resting on his side over his belt, the other - still holding her gun - pressed against his face, the dull metal flecked with zombie flesh contrasting sharply with his dark hair. Gerard bit at her lip, fingers tightening in her hair as if he were unwilling to let her go.

She was pressed up against him, pressing him hard against the wall, and she could feel how hard he was. From the fight or from her, she had no idea, and fuck it all if she cared.

She wanted... she wanted to fuck him, wanted to fucking _ravish_ him right there, with the zombie moans still echoing in the alley from the street and the sweat hot on their bodies. Wanted him. Wanted something human and alive and immediate.

The security of the gun was what gave her the recklessness to wrap a leg around Gerard, to push up against him and kiss him like the world was ending. He bit her lip and she made the decision, reaching with her free hand to clumsily unbuckle his belt between their bodies, 

He grabbed her thigh, fingers digging into her as he moved, turned and pushed her up against the wall, never breaking the kiss.

Lyn-Z pushed into it, was glad when Gerard reached up under her skirt and tugged at her underwear, helped him get them out of the way before he pushed in close again. She wrapped a leg tight around his waist, arching into him, desperate and dirty and wanting _more_.

They fucked rough and graceless and dirty, frantic and caring only about getting themselves off. She wanted to bite down on him when she came, wanted to fill herself with as much of him as possible, but didn’t, not when the taste of blood and something rotten filled her mouth when she mouthed at his shoulder. She settled for clawing at his jacket, fingertips catching on the stripes of the uniform, the homemade sewing job barely holding up from all the abuse of the night.

She was coming down from the rush of her orgasm when his shoulders stiffened. He pulled out just in time to come hot and sticky against her inner thigh. His breath was ragged in her ear as he slumped against her, all his previous frantic energy gone.

They stayed still a few moments, both catching their breath. 

“Classy,” Lyn-Z said into Gerard’s ear teasingly. She couldn’t keep the grin off her face, because she was alive and whole and pleasure was radiating out through her limbs, making her feel lazy and content.

Gerard’s cheeks turned pink – ridiculous, Lyn-Z thought, considering the fact that they were still pressed together, sticky and hot – and he said, “Sorry… I didn’t think… I mean, I don’t normally do this kind of thing.”

“Fend off hordes of the undead or fuck strange girls in alleys?” Lyn-Z teased, twisting a strand of his hair around her finger. 

“Neither,” Gerard replied, leaning in and pecking her on the lips. “And I don’t see any strange girls.”

They stayed like that for a long time, pressed tight together while Lyn-Z watched the alley entrance out of the edge of her eye.

She wasn’t sure who moved first, but suddenly Gerard wasn’t pressing her against the wall, but rather pulling away to rebutton his pants. She straightened her skirt, did her best to clean up, and then suddenly he was back, close, hugging her tentatively, like he was afraid their interlude had broken something between them. She responded by wrapping her arms around his neck and pulling him in tighter. She had never put away her gun, and she kept her fingers wrapped around the butt firmly enough that none of her fingers would slip into the trigger guard. 

When she pulled back, Gerard let go of her, some her hair sticking to his fingers as he pulled away, and fumbled in his pocket before coming up with a mostly clean red bandana, which he scraped the worst of the zombie flesh of their hands with. 

“Don’t want that getting in your cut,” he said, brushing his hand lightly over the congealing blood on her forehead.

“They say that doesn’t spread it,” she replied. She kept staring at his mouth, red and swollen now. 

“They say a lot of things,” he replied, and she unwillingly thought of those cold days of childhood, when people had been on the run and starving and only the fear of catching _it_ through the dead flesh had kept most people from cannibalism. Now they claimed the zombie virus – if it was even a fucking virus – was only spread through bites, through some convoluted mess of medical jargon that Lyn-Z suspected meant nothing at all.

“Haven’t died yet,” she replied, “Not that I know of, anyway.”

“Don’t joke about that,” Gerard replied, serious. Worry lines appeared in his forehead, and Lyn-Z glanced back at the mouth of the alley. Nothing was even moving anymore. She felt a stab of worry about Kitty and Steve and Jimmy before pushing it aside. They’d all survived worse.

“You don’t seem the type to be concerned about a few death jokes,” she said, touching his cheek. 

“Normally I’m not,” he replied, and she couldn’t help the laugh that bubbled out of her, and she leaned forward and kissed him again, gentler.

The softness seemed to emphasize how ungentle they’d been minutes before.

She rested her head against his neck, feeling the spot on his shirt where blood had started to stiffly dry under her cheek as she caught her breath and felt him regain control of himself, slumped up against her. 

She remembered to check the mouth of the alley, but the biggest danger was a sluggish severed arm dragging itself up the street. Not worth a bullet, she decided, and closed her eyes and breathed in the sweaty, sharp smell of Gerard. He might not smell much better than the dead at the moment, but he still smelled alive and that was wonderful.

She opened her mouth to tell him as much when she slowly realized the faint sound of zombies in the distance had taken on a new tone. The shrill, terrified sounds of screaming joined in the cacophony, and familiar dread took away the languid liquid feeling of contentment in Lyn-Z’s belly. 

“Fuck,” Gerard mumbled, straightening up and stumbling a little as he overcompensated. She surveyed the alley and gave Gerard back the pole he’d been using to take out the brain in the zombies they’d killed. After a second of debate she grabbed her makeshift axe as well; she only had a few more shots left.

They took off in the direction of the warehouse, jumping over destroyed zombies and avoiding the walking dead as they tried to reach their friends. As they neared the warehouse and realized with certainty that the screams echoed from within, Lyn-Z slowly reached out and took Gerard’s hand.

Hand-in-hand they slowly approached, warily keeping watch for zombies.

More were milling around, shuffling back and forth with the aimlessness the undead often showed when confused about which food source to go after. She could still hear screams coming from inside the warehouse and she told herself firmly that meant there were still living people inside, that there was hope left.

She didn’t know what she’d do if Steve or Kitty or Jimmy got taken out. It’d just been the four of them against the world for so long, she wasn’t sure that she knew how to do anything else. That she knew how to handle a world that didn’t have them in it.

She was never, ever going to tell them that because she’d never hear the fucking end of it, but that’s how it was. They’d had close calls before – and not always with the undead – but she’d always been _with_ them, watching their backs, right there in the fray with them, instead of off stupidly wasting time fucking someone she barely knew.

If she’d just stuck around… Hell, if she’d come running back as soon as they escaped that first alley, she might have been able to do something.

She dropped Gerard’s hand, and he didn’t reach back for hers.

The main entrance of the warehouse – the giant bay doors that had originally been used to receive shipments – had been rigged open for the show, and it looked as though that was how the bulk of the zombies had entered the warehouse.

They got close enough to peer inside, keeping a wary eye out to avoid any approaching zombie. 

Inside the warehouse looked like a massacre. There were bloody handprints smeared on the stack of plastic airplanes from a dismantled children’s ride, and Lyn-Z could see several severed limbs – thankfully a number of them rotted enough that they hadn’t come off anything living - scattered on the floor in puddles of fluid she couldn’t identify.

“We should go in the way we left,” Gerard whispered. It took Lyn-Z a moment to remember that staircase and labyrinth of abandoned rooms she’d followed him through what felt like lifetimes ago.

She nodded once, even though she knew that sneaking in would take much longer than just charging through the warehouse into whatever was happening in the basement and unseen corners.

The zombies all around were giving her a second burst of energy, but she knew it wouldn’t last forever and she shouldn’t waste it, not when her band’s lives might be at stake.

Gerard led the way around the building, Lyn-Z keeping careful watch just in case something managed to sneak up on them. They made it to the back entrance relatively unharassed – only one zombie posed a threat and Gerard had viciously taken it down before Lyn-Z had even had a chance to hoist her axe off her shoulder – and Lyn-Z stared at the heavy, graffiti-covered door for a few long seconds hoping that one of them would develop x-ray vision.

It was the exact sort of door that they got warned to never open in the case of a ‘worst case scenario,’ which Lyn-Z supposed this qualified as. It was too thick to allow them to guess how many creatures were scratching on the other side – a double-edged sword, she guessed, given that its thickness had probably added to the loose sort of soundproofing the basement of the warehouse had that had probably allowed the concerts to go on for as long as they had – and heavy enough to require both hands to open it.

She tried to calculate how long ago they’d both casually exited this door, but couldn’t. Too much had happened for her to mentally quantify it into neat little minutes and hours. 

“Take guard?” Gerard whispered. There was a smear of something dark and viscous across his cheek. It stood out vividly against his paleness; Lyn-Z thought that if he didn’t have such a determined look on his face that he might have been in danger of passing out.

She nodded, and awkwardly managed to balance her makeshift axe over her shoulder, propped against her arm, as she aimed her gun at the door jam. She could feel something cold and _thick_ and wet getting into her hair, and tried to not think about what it was as she stared at the gap, waiting for Gerard to pull it open.

“There’s something on the other side,” Gerard said, hands pressed flush against the door. “I can feel it hitting against the door.”

Her knees felt rubbery, and she kept imagining that the first face to pop out was going to be Jimmy’s, face half gone and groaning, or Steve’s, gone grey and voiceless, or Kitty’s, lips snarled back to snap at her with broken teeth.

“Open it,” she said shakily. “Just… open it.”

Gerard had both his hands on the door handle, but instead of swinging it open like Lyn-Z hoped he would – she just needed to see, dammit, she needed to _know_ \-- he rested his forehead against the metal and looked for a moment like he was praying.

Then she realized he was mumbling “Please don’t be Mikey, please,” over and over. 

He was praying, then, and she tried to not get impatient as he gathered the strength to find out what was behind the door. She just wanted to stop imagining the worst, wanted to erase the thought of Steve with ghoul-grey skin, wanted this to be over with and to be back on the RV teasing each other about close calls and _how the zombies had probably thought of you as one of their own, Steve, what with how you smell_ , and to be far fucking away from this hellhole.

She kept her gun aimed at the door jam, and her arm was wobbling dangerously when Gerard finally raised his head and said, “Okay,” pulling at the handle with slightly more force than necessary, swinging the door open wide enough for the zombie to stick first a hand – still pink, but with the fingertips torn and broken from clawing at the door - and then its head out.

It was a girl, probably no older than fourteen, with a bloody, smeared mouth and dead, dangerous eyes.

Lyn-Z didn’t hesitate to fire the shot.

Gerard slowly opened the door the rest of the way, but other than the corpse spilling out of the doorway, the stairwell as far down as they could see in the darkness was empty.

Lyn-Z took the lead, stepping over the corpse, trying to avoid the slick puddle of blood pooling on the top stair, and began her descent. Gerard followed, whispering warnings to her as they moved further and further from the light into the pitch-black of the hall.

She remembered that there had been lights flickering when they’d left, but something had happened in the meantime. She remembered her last glimpse of the Black Parade in one of these rooms, shrugging off sweaty jackets and laughing and teasing Gerard, and hoped like hell that they had gotten out.

No one deserved what she knew they were going to find.

Screams echoed even louder in the hallway, louder than they _should_ , like they were going to find the source with each step into the darkness. Lyn-Z waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness as she took the final steps, keeping an elbow against the wall to add to a sense of security, knowing that she was safe from at least one angle.

She almost yelped when she felt Gerard brush against her, and he quietly apologized. “Straight down this hall,” he whispered.

Lyn-Z didn’t like the idea of stumbling around in the dark with a bunch of ghouls out for her flesh, but moving was always better than staying still, even when moving towards uncertainty.

The only positive quality the darkness had was that it amplified every noise. She could hear the squeak and thuds of her own footsteps, and the way that Gerard’s feet shuffled along, as though he was afraid of stepping on something. Someone. 

Kitty and Steve and Jimmy could be laying dead on the floor right in front of her and she wouldn’t know, not even if she stepped on them.

She stumbled.

“Wait a second,” Gerard said, and then a second later flicked open his lighter. Lyn-Z let out a sigh of relief. The yellow flame only cast light a few feet, but that was enough to make the darkness seem manageable, somehow.

There was nobody in their vicinity, and she and Gerard walked down the hall side-by-side. He peered into every open doorway, holding the lighter out in front of him to cast light so that he wouldn’t get a nasty surprise.

The rooms seemed almost ominously empty, especially with the distant screams echoing through the halls. She wondered if this was what it sounded like during the concerts. If this strange tension is what the older generation felt, listening to the sound of people putting their guard down.

She wanted to lean against the wall, to just slide down and hug her knees and pretend like none of this was happening, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t leave Gerard to search alone in the dark and she couldn’t leave her band to whatever their fates were.

She couldn’t abandon everyone she loved just so that she might live a little longer.

So she didn’t falter and she kept putting one foot in front of the other. She wasn’t going to give up. She was going to get through this, and she was going to find her band and they would laugh about this. 

Gerard stopped suddenly, and it took Lyn-Z a few steps until she realized she was moving deeper into the uninterrupted darkness before she stopped too. She looked over, and he was staring down at the ground. She slowly looked down, and half of one of her boots was standing in a strange dark smear on the floor.

It looked like something had been _dragged_ through here.

Gerard raised the hand holding the lighter, and Lyn-Z wanted to laugh for a second, remembering watching old grainy videos of huge stadium concerts as a kid, but then she saw what the increased circle of light revealed.

Something had definitely been dragged out of Black Parade’s dressing room. Something alive, judging by the fact that the smear – blood, she knew from just the way the light gleamed off it, sticky and drying though it was – increased rather than tapered off down the corridor.

Gerard made a strangled sound, and she could almost see him trying not to hope it was one of his friends instead of another, or anyone rather than his brother. 

She wanted to tell him it would be okay, that his family was fine, but she couldn’t force the lie out.

Instead she reached out slowly and touched his arm. He physically jumped and took a step away from her.

“Sorry,” he immediately apologized, but he didn’t move any closer to her. She let her hand drop to her side.

So instead she did him the one kindness she could and took the first step towards the dressing room, peering into the darkness. She could make out overturned furniture, but nothing seemed to be moving inside.

She motioned for him to bring the light closer, and when he did she couldn’t help the gasp that escaped her.

There had clearly been a struggle in the room; the overturned tables and chairs were splintered and broken and had more dark smears on them. She could count four bodies from the doorway – none of them immediately appeared to be wearing the Black Parade uniform, which she was grateful for – but there were bloody handprints on the broken mirror and she could see in the flickering light her own reflection staring back at her, paler and younger than she could ever remember herself looking, flecked with blood and gore.

One of the handprints on the mirror sprawled across her refection’s throat. When she raised her hand to make sure her own throat was intact, the dull metal of the gun stood out like a brand against her too-pale skin, and she froze, staring at herself, gun resting under her chin, and thought that she could end this, she could stop living this nightmare with a single tug.

She quickly lowered her arm. She had to find her band. That was all that was important.

She didn’t want to let Gerard into the room, but he pushed roughly past her. He looked at all the corpses with a franticness Lyn-Z just didn’t feel, with a desperation that scared her.

(Maybe they’d had the wrong idea all along. Maybe being numb and dull to the horror around them was a better method of coping; maybe forgetting what life meant would make this all easier.)

“Mikey’s not here,” he said, “thank God.” The relief was evident in his voice, and then he looked down to the corpse at his feet, a young man missing most of his head – shotgun blast, Lyn-Z reckoned, hopefully post-mortem – and then dropped to his knees, tracing a tattoo on a half-gnawed arm. 

“Fuck,” he breathed out. 

Lyn-Z watched her reflection hug itself.

“Matt, fuck, Matt, I’m sorry,” Gerard was babbling, touching the arm and then drawing his hand away again and again, like that would make it less real. Lyn-Z connected the name with the laughing guy she’d met, his stories about brothels, and was grateful someone else had done the dirty work and ensured that he wouldn’t become a zombie.

“We should go,” Lyn-Z said, feeling more desperate than ever to find her band. (They had to be alive, they _had_ to be.) 

“Okay,” Gerard agreed slowly, not standing.

Lyn-Z hated herself a little for what she said next. “Crying isn’t going to help your brother.”

She told herself Gerard’s angry glare was what she’d been trying to achieve, but it hurt anyway. 

“Fuck you,” he snarled, “Matt was a good person and now he’s…”

“Now he’s dead, and if you don’t get your ass in gear that’s what we’re gonna be too,” Lyn-Z snapped back. 

They could realistically spare a few minutes for him to mourn his friend, she knew, because it was all too likely they were just going to find the rest of their friends in the same condition, but just standing here was giving her too much time to think about everything that could be happening out there.

Made her start hearing her friend’s voices in the screams that were coming at longer and longer intervals.

Gerard climbed to his feet. “You don’t even care about him.”

“Right now? I care about finding people we can still help,” she replied. “That’s it. Saving our asses and saving our bands’ asses.”

Gerard raised his hand like he was going to make a point, but it drooped back down to his side. “You’re right,” he said hollowly. “We need to go find everyone.”

Lyn-Z was worried at the lack of fight in his words, but just said, “Come on.”

She took the lead. It was simple enough to figure out the path through the labyrinthine hallways – she just had to keep following the trail of blood.

Gerard’s hand wavered as he held up his lighter up, keeping a half-step behind her. There wasn’t quite room for them to walk side-by-side without one of them stepping on the smear, and she didn’t want to imagine the blood with casual footprints in it, like they didn’t care at all that they were treading on someone’s lifeblood.

She wanted to reach over and grab Gerard’s arm, steady it so that the light wouldn’t hit the darkness like they were in a funhouse, dizzying and making the shadows deeper and darker, waiting for something to leap out. 

Both her hands were full, though, so she just kept her eyes to the floor, watching the smear as though it held clues as to how it had gotten there.

As to who had been dragged through her. Whether they’d been struggling, or if someone had been pulling them to safety.

She thought that if she was in this darkness much longer she might go mad, thinking of all the possibilities and horrors it might hold. It was hard to imagine what Gerard was thinking, since he knew that the blood belonged to someone he loved.

She was used to the wavering light enough that when Gerard stopped, it took her a second to realize it. She kept walking, then abruptly stopped when she realized there was someone standing in the blood that she was still watching like a lifeline.

She raised her eyes from a pair of dark-spattered shoes to see a kid in mismatched, old-fashioned clothes swaying back and forth, like he was hypnotized.

No, not hypnotized. Dead. She realized suddenly that he’d just risen, this shaggy-haired kid who looked as though he’d never done a bad thing in his life. Half of his neck was missing, and his head tilted strangely, as if he couldn’t quite support its weight.

He took a halting step forward, bloody scarves trailing around him like a mummy.

She glanced over. Gerard was frozen, staring at the kid.

“You know him?” she asked, trying to remember how many shots she had left. Not enough to justify wasting on a zombie this lethargic, she figured, plus she didn’t really want to risk attracting more, even with how loud the warehouse already was.

“Not by name,” Gerard said, biting his lip.

Lyn-Z knew what the problem was. “Gerard… if we find the worst out there, I can trust you to do what needs to be done. For me and my friends. Right?”

“I don’t know if--”

“And I’ll do the same for you,” she continued. “Deal?”

Instead of offering her his hand, Gerard stepped forward and decisively rammed his pole into the zombie’s skull. It slumped to the ground, scarves trailing off its shoulders, head still wobbling oddly on its destroyed neck as Gerard pulled his weapon back out and nodded at her.

“Let’s go,” she said, before Gerard started freaking out about his possibly-dead brother and band mates again.

She was having a hard enough time keeping herself from freaking out.

The hallway was an infinitesimal bit less creepy now that Gerard wasn’t wavering the light as much, but the only thing keeping Lyn-Z putting one foot in front of the other was the thought of her friends – her fucking family, really, the people she’d spent most of the past decade with, playing and fighting and struggling and fixing each other - still here somewhere, and they might still be alive.

“That way,” Gerard said, pointing to the left, and she realized that they were almost there. The blood trail ended ominously in the middle of the hallway, and she tried to not think of what that meant.

“Battle plan?” she asked, tightening her grip on her makeshift axe.

“Evade and kick all necessary ass,” Gerard said. “We’re trying to find our people, but if we can save a life…”

“Just don’t try to be a martyr,” she replied. “Getting yourself killed won’t help anyone.”

She held her breath as they took the final few steps and emerged behind the stage.

There were still lights flickering here and they revealed a massacre.

Lyn-Z stopped mid-step, and Gerard came up beside her, looking around frantically. 

“We’ve got to find them,” he said, shoving his lighter in his pocket.

Lyn-Z couldn’t even begin to guess how many zombies were in the room, and their numbers were clearly increasing by the minute. The screams were far between now – Lyn-Z figured only coming when someone was bit and dying rather than just over the situation – and she didn’t want to imagine what was going on in the seething mass of people still in the center of the room.

It didn’t look entirely dissimilar to the concert earlier, only now there were clusters of what _used_ to be kids clustered around, devouring the fallen. Zombies would look up, mouths and chins dark with blood and gristle, and the light would hit their dead, dull eyes.

“They wouldn’t be in the middle of it,” Lyn-Z said, because she knew her band were smarter than that, and hoped they hadn’t gotten caught up in anything.

“They know better,” Gerard agreed. 

They kept to the edges of the room. Lyn-Z, after some debate, put her gun back in its holster and held her makeshift axe more comfortably in her hands, at the ready. She’d stand a better chance swinging than shooting.

It was unnerving, knowing that there were zombies on all sides, so they stuck as close to the wall as possible. Lyn-Z kept seeing things she knew would haunt her dreams if she made it out of there: groups of dead kids feasting on the dying things that no longer resembled human beings, but rather bloody meat; a man with a severed arm sticking out of his pocket, wandering around like he didn’t know where he was; weird patterns of light that she realized were caused by the bulbs being splattered with blood and gore.

She kept scanning the crowd for Jimmy’s distinctive crown of hair or Kitty’s pigtails or Steve’s loud voice or even Chantal’s bright red hair, but in the confusion she was pretty sure she wouldn’t recognize them until they were right on top of her.

Gerard made a startled sound and ran over to a zombie, twirling it around. Lyn-Z couldn’t see what caused his alarm – probably the way it was dressed, all dark clothes with white stripes – but she could immediately see Gerard’s relief as he shook his head and then hit the zombie with his weapon. 

He jogged back to her and they continued on without comment on it. Lyn-Z had a pit in her stomach that was growing with every second that she didn’t find her band, and she didn’t even know what she would do if they had all been killed.

Then her heart leapt to her throat.

“Taste my boot, motherfucker!” 

She tried to make out where the voice had come from, because that was Jimmy, she _knew_ that was Jimmy. She’d recognize his stupid shrill little voice anywhere, and if she could just get to him...

He wasn’t fucking dead. He was here alive, and that meant Steve and Kitty might be alive, too.

“Jimmy!” she yelled. “Jimmy you smartass motherfucker, where are you?”

Gerard started craning his neck, looking around with her.

“Over here, buttercup!” Jimmy yelled back. Lyn –Z took down a zombie that had come staggering over after she yelled. “Battling bad fashion!”

She finally spotted him and started fighting her way over to him, Gerard close behind. She saw why she hadn’t immediately recognized him: his hair, normally spiked and teased to epic heights, was weighed down around his head in what she would only identify as zombie-goo. He had belts of weapons looped over himself like an action hero, and he was taking zombies down with what appeared to be a machete.

Beside him, also decked out in enough weapons and gore-splattered enough to camouflage her in with the undead was Chantal, cheerfully taking a metal baseball bat to the undead. “Hidey-ho!” she called, ramming her bat down into a fallen zombie’s skull.

“I’m only taking down zombies with stupid hair,” Jimmy explained as he picked out a zombie with a pompadour and took a swing at it from behind. “What’s your angle?”

“I’ve just been trying to save your sorry ass,” Lyn-Z replied. Somehow the zombie horde seemed less menacing with Jimmy and Chantal laughing at it. “Where’s everyone else?”

She joined in on the slaughter, though she just killed whatever was moving towards her, not being picky about the hairstyles. Gerard asked, “Have you seen any of my band?” as he joined in, too.

Chantal and Jimmy exchanged glances. “Kitty’s helping organizing a retreat to a safe place to use as a hospital,” Jimmy said. “They’ve been hauling out those we can help upstairs. I think there’s a building nearby they’re securing.”

“This one’s fuck-a-doodled,” Chantal agreed. “We’re trying to cull the masses, though. Do what we can.”

“What about Steve?” Lyn-Z asked.

“He’s around here somewhere,” Jimmy said casually.

Lyn-Z narrowed her eyes and was about to demand more information when Gerard pushed past her. “And my band, where’s my brother?” he demanded.

“I’ve seen them around,” Jimmy said. “Cool your jets, mister, you’re gonna get nibbled on if you just stand there throwing a fit.”

“What he means is, they went to the other building,” Chantal said, glaring. “Um. I mean, none of them looked too bad off… Except…”

She looked helplessly at Jimmy, then hit an approaching zombie in the temple with her bat. A spray of dark fluid arched out and added to the gore on her face.

“What?” Gerard said impatiently. Lyn-Z could feel the frustration radiating off him.

“I mean, your brother wasn’t in the best shape, but he was alive!” Chantal said. 

Gerard’s arm dropped, his whole body seemed to droop and lose the fight he’d had in him, and Lyn-Z kept an eye around them to make sure no zombies got close enough to be a danger. She was grateful that there were enough dying people on the ground to keep the bulk of the zombies occupied, horrible as she felt for them.

“Was he bit?” Gerard’s voice was dull and empty, like all the hope had whooshed out of him.

“I don’t know,” Chantal said gently. Jimmy hacked at a zombie staggering closer to them. “The other guys carried him off pretty quick, I didn’t see much.”

“But you’re sure it was him?”

“Those uniforms of yours are good for something,” Chantal said. “Besides, I make it a point to remember pretty boys.”

“Hey!” Jimmy exclaimed.

“You’re at the top of my list, my sweet little decapitator,” Chantal replied.

“Right back atcha, my bodacious be-header.” Jimmy blew her a kiss off the end of his machete.

Lyn-Z glared and carefully reached out and touched Gerard’s arm.

He jerked away. “I have to see him.”

“We can go right now,” Lyn-Z said. “As soon as they tell me what happened to Steve.”

“He’s alive,” Jimmy said, “though his aim’s gonna suck after this.”

“…he lost an eye?” Lyn-Z guessed.

“Don’t worry, his pretty side is fine,” Jimmy said. “But he took a dirty rotten finger to the eye, he’s not a happy camper.”

Lyn-Z looked at Gerard, his slumped shoulders, clearly summoning up the strength to find out what happened to his brother. They had to go.


	3. Chapter 3

The makeshift hospital wasn’t nearly as crowded with the injured as Lyn-Z had imagined. She knew it was because most of the people that had been injured had died and reanimated already, but she still felt a strange relief at the number of people walking around. 

“Kitty!” she yelled, spotting her quirkily angled pigtails through the crowd.

Kitty turned and the hurried over to her, wrapping her up in a big hug. “Oh my god, Zoid, I was afraid you were dead!”

“Still in one piece,” she said, “only slightly worse for wear.”

The building was much smaller and guarded on all sides by wary-looking survivors, and for the first time since watching the fence collapse Lyn-Z began to let herself off her guard. 

“Hard to tell under all the icky,” Kitty said, pulling away and pushing a strand of Lyn-Z’s bangs away from her face, scowling at the dark residue left on her fingers.

“Like you’re pristine,” Lyn-Z said, giving Kitty’s outfit a pointed look. “You’ve totally got guts on you.”

“Since I hugged you, yeah,” Kitty teased back. 

Lyn-Z glanced over to where Gerard was hurrying from pallet to pallet. “Where’s his brother at?”

“We put him in the special room,” Kitty said.

Lyn-Z bit her lip.

“Come on, I’ll show you,” she said. Lyn-Z managed to get Gerard’s attention and they followed Kitty through a curtain fashioned out of an old tarp into a darker, more depressing room.

It was clear this was where the worst-case-scenarios were being put. Lyn-Z reached over and took Gerard’s hand, squeezing it tight. He didn’t pull away.

Kitty lead them to the bed that half of the Black Parade were clustered around, and Lyn-Z braced herself for the worst.

“Hey, look who we found,” Kitty said cheerfully, and Frank turned around and almost tackled Gerard, hugging him tight enough that Gerard staggered a few steps back. 

Lyn-Z couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, but she untangled her fingers from Gerard’s and stepped aside, standing close to Kitty. Ray nodded to her briefly, not getting up from Mikey’s side. “Bob’s out shooting zombies from the roof,” he explained to them.

Mikey himself was sitting up, watching Frank and Gerard with a big smile across his face. He looked… 

He didn’t look any worse off from the rest of them, really.

Lyn-Z glanced over to Kitty, who just shook her head. 

Gerard broke the hug with Frank and dropped down next to Mikey, looking at him like he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. “Mikey… god, I was so worried…”

“I thought I wouldn’t get to see you again,” Mikey replied, and wrapped Gerard in a hug. They stayed like that for what felt like forever, Lyn-Z awkwardly looking away because it felt too intimate to watch. 

She knew logically that it had just been luck that she’d been with Gerard when the fence had fallen, but she still felt like if he’d been with his band… if she’d been with hers… things would have been better.

Somehow, things would have been better. She flushed when she remembered the alley, and how she hadn’t even thought of anyone else but herself. She could almost hear Kitty telling her practically that it was a natural reaction, that Kitty would have done the same if she’d had the opportunity, but instead of getting off everyone else had been doing shit to _help_ people.

“Where’s Steve?” she whispered, and the way Kitty rolled her eyes did a lot to ease her fear that he was off dying somewhere. 

“Somewhere around here making people miserable,” Kitty replied. “He’s not in great shape, but he’s better off than a lot of people, not that you can tell from his bitching.”

Lyn-Z smiled, but her smile faded as Gerard pulled away from his brother with a horrified expression. 

“ _Where_?” Gerard demanded in a broken-sounding voice.

Mikey swallowed and pulled aside the blanket that was draped over his legs. The left leg was fine, grimy uniform pant leg intact, but the right pant leg had been cut off above the knee, revealing a pale, knobby knee and…

“Oh, god,” Lyn-Z said, covering her mouth with her hand.

On Mikey’s right calf was a gory round wound that was unmistakably a bite mark from human teeth. The center of the wound was bruised deep purple already, and from the teeth marks red streaks of infection crept out onto pale unmarked flesh.

“It stopped bleeding,” Mikey said. “It was pouring blood, you should have seen it. And it’s gone numb, which is a definite improvement.”

“Mikey,” Gerard managed to say. “Oh god, Mikey.”

“I’ve probably got a day or two left,” he continued, like he was reciting facts that had no bearing on his own life whatsoever. “Before it gets to my heart or brain or whatever it is that kills you and turns you into a zombie.”

Gerard reached out slowly, hand hovering inches above the wound. “Mikey, what happened?”

“My boots almost saved me,” he said, looking down at the wound. “The fucking thing didn’t even have any legs! I got taken out by a gimpy zombie, can you believe that shit?”

The sound Gerard made was somewhere between a sob and a laugh. 

“Take me to Steve,” Lyn-Z whispered to Kitty. She couldn’t watch this anymore. 

*

“I think it makes me look dashing,” Steve said, tightening the bandage that was tied around his face. Lyn-Z recognized it as the bandana Steve regularly wore tied around his head, and told herself it wasn’t all that different.

“Like a pirate,” Kitty agreed. “A very debonair pirate.”

“Exactly!” Steve said. “And this right here is exactly why we have two eyes, anyhow.”

“Built-in spare parts!” Kitty agreed.

Lyn-Z managed to nod. Steve and Kitty continued to laugh, and she just stared at the bandage covering Steve’s missing eye and then leaned forward and hugged him tight.

He wrapped his arms around her and patted her shoulder. “It’s okay, Zoid.”

“Fuck you, I’m the one who’s supposed to be consoling you right now,” Lyn-Z said, pressing her face into the shoulder of his shirt. It was warm and clean enough that she figured his gore-soaked jacket was laying around in a corner somewhere, and she just breathed in his smell.

She just stayed there, feeling something close to safe. 

“Room for a group hug?” 

And Kitty was there, too, smooshed in close with her head tucked up against Steve’s other shoulder. 

Lyn-Z tried to not think about it, but her mind kept going back to Gerard and Mikey and how broken they’d all looked. Frank’s tired eyes and Ray’s slumped shoulders and Mikey cracking jokes to keep them all from sinking further into despair. 

And Gerard…

“Do you think he’s going to be okay?” She said, then remembered to clarify, “Gerard, I mean.”

Steve and Kitty were silent, then Kitty ventured, “It’s not going to be easy for him.”

She started rubbing circles on Lyn-Z’s shoulder, and Lyn-Z just stayed there, trying to keep this memory of being safe and warm close inside, to ward off the nightmares she knew she was going to have if she managed any sleep.

Eventually Steve shoved her away with a, “God, girl, go clean some of those guts off, you reek.”

Lyn-Z tried to head-butt him with a part of her hair she could feel was grossest, and Steve pushed her away. 

“Where can I clean up?” she asked.

Kitty pointed to the makeshift curtains on the left side of the building. “Over there. It’s pretty gnarly though.”

“I can handle it,” Lyn-Z said. She found the sinks and did as good a job as she could to get the blood and unidentifiable bits of zombie off her and out of her hair, scrubbing at her face and stripping off her knee socks, throwing them in with the smelly mound of discarded, unsalvageable clothing in the corner.

She took longer than she needed, carefully making sure she’d gotten everything cleaned off and assessing how many injuries she’d sustained during the course of the day.

Mostly bruises, a few scrapes and cuts, and one slice on her leg that she thought she should probably find some bandages for, as it started bleeding when she accidentally scrubbed away the scab and wasn’t stopping.

She’d found one of the people who seemed more confident with dealing with injuries – she finally was grateful for the survival and medical training the government had forced them all through, and the fact that some people had retained their knowledge better than others – and put up with the disapproving noises as they put in a few stitches and bandaged up her leg.

She returned to Steve’s side and started teasing him about his lack of peripheral vision. He’d somehow gotten a bottle of whiskey – homemade shit, she was guessing from the unlabeled bottle and the lack of color -- and was downing it steadily enough that she knew he was hurting more than he was letting on.

He offered her the bottle, and she took in a mouthful. It was similar enough to drinking paint thinner that she almost teared up as she forced it down. “I hope you didn’t pay much for this shit,” she choked out, taking another tiny sip just to feel the burn down her throat again.

She allowed herself a glance at the tarp blocking off the area where the Black Parade were holding their vigil over Mikey, and she held back the urge to give Steve another hug. Her band was safe, and she felt guilty for how relieved she was.

“I stole it,” Steve told her.

“Smooth,” she told him. She reached up and brushed her fingers lightly over the bandana over his missing eye. “Feel like sharing your war story?”

Steve nodded magnanimously and began to weave his tale, explaining how he’d been trying to get the kids left over from the show out of the building when they’d realized that the zombies were breaking in. “So I shoved this little bitch out of the way, and the dead-ass motherfucker just lurched at me and the last thing I saw was this grimy-ass finger going into my goddamn eye,” Steve concluded crankily. 

“What happened to your reflexes?” she teased. 

Steve stiffened, and Lyn-Z started to apologize, but realized that he was staring off towards the entrance. She turned, and Jimmy was helping Chantal along, who was glaring and looking as though she wanted anything but to be helped.

They were even gorier than they’d been when she’d last seen them what felt like years ago, and Chantal was cradling her arm strangely.

She was on her feet before she’d realized what she was doing, and she hurried over to them.

“She’s fucking… they got her,” Jimmy was babbling, looking more stricken than she’d ever seen him.

“I’m fine!” Chantal said, attempting to wrench her good arm free of Jimmy’s tight grasp. “I’m just… fuck, I’m fine, dammit.”

Lyn-Z could see what was wrong with Chantal’s arm now. She was cradling it not because it was broken, like Lyn-Z has assumed, but because of a wound just inside her elbow on the tender fleshy part of her arm.

A round, bite-shaped wound. Chantal’s arms were too grimy and covered in gore for Lyn-Z to tell for certain, but she probably didn’t have the streaks of infection like Mikey did yet. The wound was still seeping blood. 

“Chantal--” she started, then stopped, unsure about what to say. 

“I’ll be fucking _fine_ ,” Chantal insisted, voice getting higher and higher. “Just pour some fucking alcohol on it, some boiling water, cut the infection the fuck out, anything.”

Lyn-Z didn’t bother to say that it didn’t work like that; Chantal clearly knew already. Jimmy pulled her in close for a hug, and looked more heartbroken than he had in the ten years she’d known him. Fuck.

“Let’s go back here,” Kitty suggested, pointing towards the sectioned-off part of the room.

It was a quarantine, Lyn-Z suddenly realized. It was where to put the people they’d have to put down like dogs as soon as the infection got too severe.

She lead the way, trying to not catch any of the Black Parade’s eyes as she and Kitty lead Chantal and Jimmy past them, Steve trailing behind, still clutching his bottle of moonshine.

She helped Kitty set up a pallet for Chantal, who glared and announced loudly, “Stop treating me like a fucking invalid. I’m not going to fucking die.”

They had the attention of everyone now. Lyn-Z glanced over and Gerard was watching them with a strange expression, like he was watching a play he’d already seen.

“Maybe some of us should leave…” Kitty offered, but no one moved.

“I don’t want you to die,” Jimmy said. “But look at your arm, Chantie, that thing got you good.”

“It’s only a flesh wound!” she said, and across the room Mikey let out a loud snort of laughter.

Chantal let Jimmy take her arm and start cleaning it with a wet cloth, revealing pale skin under the dried-on mess as he worked his way towards the wound. “I just think that this isn’t a death sentence,” she said, staring at her arm. “I know what it means, but I think that we can figure something out.”

“They won’t just chop off my leg,” Mikey said from across the room. “I already asked.”

Chantal bit her lip as Jimmy dabbled at the wound carefully with a clean side of the rag. She hissed in a breath, and then said, “Pedro’s father was in the military.”

She didn’t continue immediately, just stared at her arm, and Steve finally prodded, “And that’s got to do with this… how?”

“He told him a story this one time, about something that happened during the Rising,” Chantal said. “Pedro told me and I didn’t really believe it, but now it’s all I can think about. There was this general who was commanding one of the cleansing squads, you know, one of those groups that spent all their time tossing the undead into incinerators. And one day Pedro’s dad saw this general get bit, you know, on the ankle by a zombie he walked a little too close to. The general played it off like it hadn’t happened. But there was blood on the ground and he limped off, and Pedro’s dad figured he was fucked.”

Everyone in the room was listening, rapt, and Lyn-Z pulled her eyes away from Chantal long enough to look back at Gerard and Mikey. Frank had squirmed up next to them and was gripping on to both of them like he was going to lose them both at any second, and Ray was staring at Chantal like he was trying to force the ending of the story out with his mind.

Jimmy was dabbling at her arm without seeming to see what he was doing.

“So the general went back to the headquarters that night and then came back the next day and went about things as usual, and the day after, and the day after. He didn’t ever die,” Chantal said. “Leastways not then. So I figure that the army has something. They know how to fix this shit.”

“So you think you’ll be okay because of what a dead dude’s daddy said he thought he saw twenty years ago?” Steve said. He settled on the floor next to Chantal’s pallet awkwardly, clearly thrown off by the darkness to his right. 

“No, I think that getting bit isn’t a death sentence, not when we passed an abandoned fucking military base on our way here,” Chantal said. “They might have left stuff there.”

"It's a long shot," Kitty said, though she sounded less cynical than Steve. 

Chantal looked pointedly at her arm. It was still seeping blood, and the rag Jimmy was using on her arm had already turned bright red with darker spots where it was drying. "I'm not gonna give in to odds right yet."

"You're also not going to be going anywhere soon," Jimmy said. "You're hurt." 

Lyn-Z had never really heard Jimmy be so concerned with someone. It was disconcerting, how much Chantal seemed to have grown on him in such a short time.

"Yeah, but you aren't," Gerard spoke up. "We can go look."

"We can go break into a military base?" Kitty said. "That's a pretty tall order."

"It can be done," Frank said confidently. 

“Of course it can be _done_ ,” Steve said, leaning his head against the wall and giving Frank his best derisive glare. It hadn’t really lost its impact, Lyn-Z was happy to see. “But why would a mystery cure for an incurable disease be floating around in an abandoned military facility?”

“You know,” Ray said, “I heard they abandoned that thing kind of quickly.”

Lyn-Z blinked. Mikey was sitting up straighter and was looking at Chantal with hope.

“Some kind of chemical spill,” Mikey said. “Remember, Gee? We used to joke about getting superpowers from there.”

Gerard nodded. “People started saying it was haunted or some shit, because the people who said they were going to break in never came back out.”

“And we could?” Lyn-Z couldn’t help bursting out with. 

“We do kick a lot of ass,” Jimmy said. “And we have more practice at it than the teenage dingbats who usually fall for shit like this.”

“We could at least check it out,” Kitty said. She looked around. “If there was a chemical spill there will seals on the doors and biohazard signs. If not…”

“I don’t want to get anyone killed,” Chantal said. “But fuck, I don’t want to be a zombie yet.”

“You know, that story about the general kind of plays into some of the weirder stuff that went on back then,” Mikey said. He was twisting the edge of his blanket in his hands. “Remember there were those accounts of doctors who got bit and never turned?”

“Those accounts were on Unsolved Mysteries,” Ray said skeptically. 

“Where there’s smoke there’s fire,” Chantal said. 

Jimmy had finished cleaning off Chantal’s arm and now wrapped a bandage around it, making frustrated noises when he didn’t get it right. Chantal hissed some, and Mikey said, “Don’t worry, it’ll stop hurting soon.”

“That’s scarier than the pain,” Chantal replied, and Jimmy tucked the edge of the bandage in, patting her arm in a proud sort of way.

He stood up and said, “Well, let’s go.”

“Go?” Steve said.

“Chantal thinks this place might save her, I’m going,” Jimmy said. “Gather up some weapons and let’s get to the RV.”

“Don’t you think we should talk about this some more?” Kitty said.

“What’s there to talk about?” Jimmy said. “We hop on down there, pop in and see what’s what, then we head back. Easy peasy.”

“If you ignore the giant zombie horde hungry for our flesh,” Steve said. He motioned towards his missing eye. “Those fuckers don’t play fair.”

“Neither do we!” Jimmy replied. “We can torch their asses. Shoot ‘em. Plow ‘em down. All we gotta do is get to the RV.”

“I _could_ do with some sweet, bloody revenge,” Steve said thoughtfully. 

“But we’d have to get to the RV,” Lyn-Z said. “There are a lot of fucking zombies out there.”

“We can take ‘em,” Jimmy said. “Go wild west on the motherfuckers.”

Jimmy wasn’t going to change his mind. Lyn-Z had known him long enough to tell that he was being the sort of lighthearted that meant he was going to go through with what he was planning come hell or high water. The only question left was if he was going alone or not.

“We should get together some weapons,” she said. “We’ve got shit in the RV but two blocks is a long fucking way in this shitstorm.”

Kitty nodded. “And none of you are in fighting shape right now.”

“Fuck that, I am,” Frank announced. Gerard nodded, determined through the gore that was still caked on his face. He clearly hadn’t left his brother’s side.

“We can take ‘em,” Steve said.

“Let’s fucking go,” Jimmy said. He was now clutching Chantal’s hand in his own. 

Lyn-Z didn’t like the thought of returning to the fray, but she wasn’t going to let Jimmy lose Chantal, especially since she could see just how far gone for her he was. 

If the situation wasn’t so horrible, she’d probably be teasing him for being a fool in love.

She glanced over at Gerard, who had wrapped an arm around his brother’s shoulder and was leaning in close, saying something.

She knew it would break him just as bad as Jimmy if he lost Mikey, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to be around to see him destroyed like that. Not if there was the slightest chance that they could help.

*

She and Kitty and Steve left the quarantined ward to discuss the details of their attempt and give Chantal and Jimmy some privacy. The Black Parade stayed together, Bob appearing as if he’d been summoned after a few minutes, joining the group clustered around Mikey, talking quietly.

“You can’t go,” Kitty tried to explain to Steve.

He snorted. “You think I can sit around here watching people die while you all are out having all the fun? Fuck that. I’m going.”

He clearly was not going to accept any arguments, and Lyn-Z and Kitty just nodded. They knew better than to get between Steve and what he wanted to do, and to be honest Lyn-Z didn’t like the idea of leaving the warehouse without him.

They ransacked the makeshift hospital for weapons that looked like they’d hold up for the two-block fight they had ahead of them, and then returned to the quarantined ward, offering weapons to Jimmy and Gerard and Frank. Ray was going to stay to watch over Mikey, it was decided, and Bob was forced to stay after he reluctantly revealed he’d twisted his ankle, something that would definitely keep him from racing to the RV.

Chantal looked like she wanted to go with them, but instead just told Jimmy, “Try not to get your ass bit, too. Unless you find the cure, then you can try it out on yourself first.”

“Anything for you, sweet cheeks,” Jimmy replied. They nuzzled their heads together, and Lyn-Z looked away.

Gerard was hovering. “I shouldn’t go,” he said. “I should stay here with you.”

Mikey rolled his eyes. “If you stay you’re just going to tap your foot a lot and come up with grotesque scenarios of what’s happening to them and how the cure is never coming.”

“But I’ll be with you! If I go…” Gerard shook his head. “I don’t want to abandon you, Mikey.”

“Come on,” Frank said. “Let’s go.”

They all took stock the weapons they’d salvaged. Lyn-Z had a proper axe now, which felt better in her hands than her makeshift one had. On the way out a huge bald man Lyn-Z vaguely recognized from the party and the shows showed up holding what looked like a mace. It looked homemade, thick nails sticking out of a thick wooden club, but Lyn-Z’s hands itched to get to try it out.

“Worm!” Gerard said delightedly.

“Bryar told me what was up,” Worm said. “You’re not gonna get far without some muscle.”

Lyn-Z and Jimmy exchanged glances. They could definitely use muscle like this dude.

Gerard slung the baseball bat Chantal had given him on his shoulder, mouth set in a determined scowl. “Let’s go.”

*

The fight to the RV was more gruesome than Lyn-Z had expected.

Lyn-Z could barely remember what the hordes had been like on the way in; she’d been so lost in just _getting_ there, making sure everyone was alive and safe, hoping and terrified. Zombies ran together in her mind into one big blur of graying flesh, white bone shining through torn skin, an endless amorphous mass of rotting limbs and gaping mouths.

Now that she’d had time to rest a moment and see what damage the zombies could wreak, she’d had time to get scared. She couldn’t freeze up now, though. 

Worm took the lead, cutting a path through the zombies easily, bashing heads with his mace and jerking it out easily, unbothered by the skull fragments that clung to the nails as he moved along.

Lyn-Z took Steve’s bad side, making sure no one snuck up on his blind spot. They didn’t insult him by having someone else take his other side, but Lyn-Z exchanged glances with Jimmy and he stuck close enough to swing if things got nasty.

Frank was a blur, moving from the front to the back of the group constantly. Gerard and Kitty took the rear, making sure nothing snuck up on them and taking out the zombies that slipped through to get too close to the center of their group.

They system worked while they were still within sight of the warehouse. As soon as they got far enough away that the lights were the only dim beacons of safety remaining, Lyn-Z felt a stab of nervousness in her belly.

The zombies weren’t any denser, but further away from the source of fresh meat there seemed to be an undercurrent of… desperation.

It was ridiculous to think that, Lyn-Z knew perfectly well that zombies only really had one mode, and it was hungry, not desperate. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that things were going to get a lot worse before they managed to get to the RV.

This was supposed to be the simplest part of their journey. Lyn-Z took a swing at a zombie, feeling the _thud_ of impact up through her arms in that perfect, satisfying way. 

In the time it took for her to make sure the zombie was no longer a threat, straighten up and swing again, everything went to hell.

Everything was chaotic, people screaming over the constant guttural moans of zombies from all sides, thuds and the splintering _cracks_ of shattering bone. Lyn-Z kept getting flashes of what was going on around her, like her eyes wouldn’t focus for long enough to completely take in the scene.

Frank stumbled. Lyn-Z saw him out of the corner of her eye darting back to join Worm at the front of the group. He tripped over a fallen corpse, landing hard on the pavement.

Gerard yelled. Kitty shrieked, “Stop, no!”

Lyn-Z didn’t see what Kitty was yelling at. 

Worm spun on his heels, eyes going wide with shock as he saw Frank on the ground, Gerard stumbling forward to help him. 

Jimmy and Steve were both right there, trying to fend the zombies away from Frank. Gerard grabbed his hand, pulled, and Frank screamed. Gerard dropped his arm and Frank tried to scramble to his feet, letting the arm hang limply to his side. It was clearly broken, and Lyn-Z could only imagine how much Gerard’s helpful gesture had hurt.

Lyn-Z kept hacking away at the zombies coming at her, trying to keep any from slipping through and getting to everyone.

Worm stopped dead in his tracks.

Lyn-Z kicked away a dismembered arm that was still trying to inch towards fresh meat and then looked up. For a moment – a horrifyingly long moment, stretched out double, triple, a dozen times the length of a normal moment – she saw why Worm had stopped.

A zombie that had presumably fallen, head intact, had its mouth clamped around Worm’s calf, high enough that it wasn’t protected by his boots. Bright red blood stained the zombie’s crooked teeth, and Lyn-Z could see how quickly the dark stain was spreading on the remaining pants leg.

Worm hit at the zombie with his mace, but there was already another one, this one taking a bite out of his arm, and another, and another, rotting arms encircling Worm’s body. Gerard and Frank tried to rush over, stave off the influx of zombies, but Lyn-Z could already tell that the damage was too severe.

They had to run for it, do their best to keep away from the undead. Gerard and Frank were just going to get themselves killed trying to save a dead man.

Frank was whacking at the zombies with his good arm, but his face contorted with pain as his shattered arm jostled with every swing. Gerard was hitting at the zombies with the frantic, terrified speed of someone trying to brush spiders off themselves, and it was a losing fight.

“You grab Gerard,” Jimmy said as he and Kitty moved towards Frank, Kitty protecting Jimmy’s back from attack as he grabbed Frank around the waist and pulled him back. Lyn-Z watched Steve’s back as he did the same to Gerard, whose shoulders slumped with defeat as he was pulled away, unlike Frank, who kicked and screamed the whole way.

Lyn-Z was going to be haunted by the anguished look in Worm’s eyes as he didn’t even try to follow them, just fell to his knees, still swinging his mace ineffectually at the zombies that has overtaken him.

The RV was in sight, still sitting where they’d parked it eons ago, looking none the worse for wear. 

They raced towards it, terror giving them speed they hadn’t had before, and they reached the RV itself without anyone sustaining major injury or getting bit.

Jimmy struggled with the door a bit, trying to jam the key into the lock as they formed a circle to fight off the stray zombies that approached.

Finally he managed to wrench open the door and they piled in, slamming it shut behind them, locking it and quickly checking to make sure that all the windows were still secure.

When they all realized they were in relative safety, there was silence in the RV, just the sound of them all slowly getting their breathing back to normal. 

Then Gerard made kind of a choked sound, and Lyn-Z automatically reached over and rested her hand on his. He jerked away, hugging himself, faraway look in his eyes.

“Worm’s dead,” he said in an empty, disbelieving tone. “Worm _died_ and Matt died and all those kids died.”

“And now we’re going to do every fucking thing we can to make sure that Chantal and your brother don’t join them,” Jimmy said.

“Yeah,” Frank said. He was perched at the edge of his seat, arm held gingerly against him. Steve went to the cabinet where they stored their first aid supplies and fashioned Frank a makeshift sling, offering him a drink out of the bottle of whisky they kept with the bandages and medicines. “Gerard, you don’t fucking give up. What gives?”

“I don’t want Mikey to die alone,” Gerard said, voice tiny. 

Frank immediately began to protest, telling him Mikey wasn’t going to die, that Mikey was surrounded by friends. Lyn-Z didn’t say anything, just like the rest of her band didn’t.

Life and death were sudden, unpredictable things, especially now, especially when things were this bad.

Lyn-Z didn’t bother to consult with everyone before she spoke up. She already knew what had to be done with Frank. “We’ll drop you back off,” she said. “On our way to the facility.”

“You don’t know the way there,” Frank said immediately.

“We saw it on the way in,” Steve said. “Besides, you can draw us a map.”

“Gerard can, anyway,” Frank said, motioning towards his useless arm.

“We can handle it,” Kitty said in her no-nonsense tone that no one could argue with.

“I want to help save him,” Gerard protested.

“You did,” Lyn-Z said. She wanted to hug him, wanted to wrap her arms around his shoulders and let him rest his head against her and feel comfort, but she didn’t think that he would let her.

He looked closed-off, as if Worm’s death was the final nail in the coffin, as if he just couldn’t bear to see anything else today. 

She couldn’t blame him – the day was wearing on her, each minute bringing new images and experiences that would haunt her nightmares, and she hadn’t even loved the people who she’d watched die. Everyone she loved was here, in this RV, and she felt a horrible stab of satisfaction that they were all okay.

“We’ll do our best,” she promised him, knowing that it was the best she could do. She couldn’t promise him a cure, couldn’t promise that they’d even make it back. Jimmy went to the front and started the RV, the rumbling of the engine making the journey finally seem real, cementing the fact that they were going to go out, break into a government facility, and try to find a cure for Gerard’s dying brother, going to find a cure for bright, bubbly Chantal.

She fumbled around and found a bent-up pack of cigarettes. She offered one to Gerard, then took one herself before passing the pack on to Frank. She realized she didn’t have a lighter, but then Gerard held out the one that’d lit their way in the dark of the warehouse. She took it gratefully.

Gerard met her eyes as the RV lurched into gear, and he slowly reached across the table and took her hand. They stayed like that, silent, dirty hands laced together, until Jimmy lurched the RV to a stop as close to the warehouse entrance as possible. 

It hurt a little when he pulled his hand away, physically because the zombie gunk on their hands had dried together, but also because Lyn-Z wasn’t sure if she was going to see him again. There was no telling what the future might bring, she thought, surprising herself with how fatalistic her attitude had gotten since seeing Worm, a giant of a man, fall so easily.

So she threw her arms around his neck and pressed a kiss on his neck just below his ear, and whispered, “ _I’ll_ do my best.”

Gerard squeezed her close for a moment in response, and then he was helping Frank out, dashing into the warehouse, disappearing into the dark.

*

The RV felt empty with just the four of them, and Lyn-Z felt disconcerted. It’d been just them for so many years, and now suddenly that didn’t feel like enough. They were all strangely quiet as they left the city, the RV bump-bump-bumping over the fallen with a disregard that made Lyn-Z a little queasy.

They all spent time scrubbing themselves clean of the day, of the bits that used to be people and the stains that they couldn’t identify. Lyn-Z was relieved when the only injuries she had were little nicks and bruises that clearly hadn’t been caused by the teeth of the undead, and everyone else seemed that much brighter once they realized that they were safe, they’d survived.

Jimmy kept swerving erratically and finally Kitty took over. 

“Too much time to think,” Jimmy said as he handed the wheel over. 

“She’s going to be okay,” Kitty replied, squeezing him close before settling down in the driver’s seat.

Lyn-Z tried to not worry about Gerard, but it was impossible. She picked at the hem of her jacket, curled up in the corner of the couch as the RV bumped along the debris-covered road. 

“You look like you’re the one missing an body part,” Steve said, leaning over and patting her knee. “What’s up, Zoid?”

“Nothing,” she said sullenly, feeling like she was seventeen again trying to avoid her mother’s questions about where she’d spent the night.

“She’s mooning over loverboy,” Kitty called from the driver’s seat. 

“I do not moon!” Lyn-Z said. “Except for hilarious purposes.”

“Notice she didn’t deny the loverboy part,” Jimmy said slyly, perking up for the first time. “Somebody got some!”

Lyn-Z felt her cheeks going pink and she said, “Fuck you guys, aren’t we on a covert mission? Shouldn’t we like… scheme?”

“Scheme, schmeme,” Jimmy said, hitting his stride. “We bust the gate, we haul our asses inside, we try not to turn into mutants. Now’s time for girl talk.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Lyn-Z said.

“Was he a gentleman?” Kitty asked. Lyn-Z could see the crinkles of a smile in the bit of her face reflected in the side view mirror. 

“I bet he was,” Jimmy said. “ _Please_ and _thank you_ and _oh here’s my jacket to lie upon, my queen_!”

“I bet he found a rose-petal covered bed,” Steve offered. “Lacy curtains wafting around.”

Lyn-Z kind of got the impression that normally Gerard _was_ that sort of knight in shining armor. “When the hell could we have found a rose-petal covered bed?”

“Ooh, so it was down and dirty,” Steve said. He did a complicated hand-gesture. 

“I don’t even know what that _meant_ ,” Lyn-Z said, motioning towards Steve’s hand, “but it wasn’t that big a deal. Just sort of pumped up from all the killing and whatnot.”

She refused to share more, even when Jimmy tickle-attacked her, grabbing her sides and making her wheeze with laughter. She didn’t have a real reason to hold back on the details - she’d dished all sorts of things to them in the past, they were her best friends – but still, the atmosphere in the van was lighter.

It was a relief, laughing. They all laughed til tears were running down their cheeks, sides sore as the laughter trailed off into gasps and chuckles. She leaned back on the familiar, stained couch and just looked at the lightening sky outside.

Dawn had arrived, and they were all alive.

*

She jolted awake when the RV came to a slow stop. Lyn-Z wasn’t sure how long she’d been asleep – not long, she figured. She wasn’t stiff and her limbs still had the heaviness that came along with bone-deep weariness.

Steve was drooling on her shoulder, bandana hiding the mess his eye had become. She stretched up as much as she could without disturbing him, trying to see out the window. All she could see was soft blue morning sky, and she turned to see what Jimmy and Kitty were doing. 

They were standing in the front of the RV, heads close together, discussing something intently.

Lyn-Z shook Steve’s shoulder, moving her hand quick enough to avoid his usual early-morning slap at anything disturbing him, and managed to untangle herself from him. 

Once she was standing, she could see what was going on.

They were parked a few hundred yards from the gate of the facility, which was thickly crowded with zombies.

“Let’s run the ass-munches down,” Jimmy said. Lyn-Z approached slowly, rubbing at her eyes, making sure they were really at the facility. That it really existed.

“We’re not gonna smash the gate,” Kitty said. “We’re going to _open_ the gate so we can _close_ it and both have a vehicle to get away in and something between us and the zombies while we’re inside.”

“I’ll get the weapons,” Lyn-Z said, deciding to let them fight it out.

By the time Steve was up and moving and Lyn-Z had distributed weaponry, they had a plan worked out.

Kitty pulled the RV a dozen or so yards from the gate. Armed and ready, they stood in a line, RV to their back so they couldn’t get surrounded. The zombies advanced.

Slowly.

“They’re just shuffling right along, aren’t they?” Steve observed. “Maybe we should sit down. Conserve some energy.”

“It could be their _plan_ ,” Jimmy replied, holding his axe at the ready. “Show signs of being a lard-ass and they go into super-mode!”

Kitty gave Jimmy a disbelieving look. “Their brains are leaking out of their _ears_. Do you really think they have a plan?”

Jimmy lowered his machete and turned to Kitty. “Zombies are metaphysical motherfuckers, they don’t _need_ brains to plan.”

“I think _you’re_ the metaphysical motherfucker,” Lyn-Z said, propping her axe on her shoulder and leaning against the bus. She eyed the approaching horde. A few of the zombies appeared to be drifting away from the group. 

“They just don’t have the same lust for life that city zombies have,” Steve said. “Think it’s the thrill of the forbidden flesh?”

They waited and the zombies got closer and closer.

“Now!” Kitty yelled, and they all turned and hopped back in the RV. They plowed over the zombies and halted to a stop at the now nearly-deserted gate. Jimmy hurried out with their bolt-cutters and the gate swung open, Jimmy standing on the RV’s runner boards to hop out and close the gate again after they’d gotten through.

The drive across the field towards the facility was filled with high-fives, disbelieving that their plan to lure zombies away from the gate had worked.

When they got close, Steve said, “Alright. We ready for this?”

Lyn-Z wondered if her responding grin looked as bloodthirsty as she felt.

They pulled as close as they could to the entrance and Lyn-Z eyed the space. “Steve, you gonna stay here and guard the RV?”

Steve blinked and she tried to not imagine what was going on underneath his bandana. “Is this because I’ve only got one eye now? Because lots of one-eyed dudes have taken out entire hordes of zombies.”

“And I’m sure they’d had more time to adjust to their new lack of depth perception than you have, Cyclops,” Kitty replied.

“Right-o,” Jimmy said. “Steve, my one-eyed wonder, it’s not like you’ve never taken point before.”

“What the fuck ever,” Steve said sullenly. “I’ll just do my best to shoot things.”

“That’s a boy,” Lyn-Z said, patting his arm. He flipped her off.

Working up the courage to step out of the relative safety of the RV into the unknown of an abandoned military research center was easier than Lyn-Z thought it would be. They checked their weapons and ammo and then lined up at the door, waving and telling Steve they’d see him in a few.

Then they filed out and hurried to the door they’d scoped out.

Lyn-Z and Jimmy kept an eye out while Kitty worked on the door, tip of her tongue stuck out as she managed to get the lock loose. “Someone’s been here before,” she said. “This lock’s been jimmied before.”

“Well at least some of the rumors are right, then” Jimmy said. “Kiddies came here for make outs. But did they make it out again?”

He made a spooky sound and wiggled his fingers, and Lyn-Z elbowed him as they went through the door. There were no seals, no signs to indicate there had been a massive chemical spill.

Mostly it looked as though the place had been abandoned in a hurry. 

There were yellowed papers scattered across the floor, and thick layers of dust covered everything. Some places it looked disturbed, though by what Lyn-Z couldn’t tell. They walked in a short distance. There were flickering florescent emergency lights still on, and Lyn-Z wondered what sort of generator they were hooked up to that was still working after years of neglect.

Maybe someone had been stopping by to ensure it was working. But why?

“I don’t like this,” she said aloud, her words echoing oddly in the empty halls. “It feels wrong.”

“We’ve just got to find the lab,” Kitty said.

“We’re not punking out now,” Jimmy said. He sounded grim and determined. “I can’t go back and watch her die.”

Lyn-Z nodded. It felt like moving through quicksand, forcing one foot in front of the other, but she did it. They’d do the same for her.

They filed down the most promising hallway, following scuff marks in the dust that didn’t look anything like footprints. The lights were dull and yellow and cast strange shadows on the wall as they swung overhead.

“Be sure to yell if you see anything move,” Kitty whispered. Lyn-Z nodded. 

Jimmy was practically walking backwards to ensure that nothing crept up on them, and Lyn-Z felt more and more tense the deeper into the facility they went without seeing any signs of life.

They passed an office with a desiccated apple still sitting on the desk, and Lyn-Z bit her lip. “You guys, this place was abandoned in a hurry.”

She didn’t like how her voice wavered, but no one called her a scaredy pants like she thought they would. Instead Jimmy just said, “The lab, then we’re gone.”

Kitty just nodded. 

Lyn-Z kept going down the hall, peering down the corridors that branched off but sticking to the main pathway, figuring it would lead them to the lab areas. Or, she thought, at the very least to some sort of map or fire escape planning route taped to the wall or _something_.

She glanced behind her. Kitty had her determined face on, clutching her rifle with both hands, and Jimmy had his hand on the revolver still in his gun-belt, ready to draw. She could barely make out the bright shine of natural light at the entrance of the building, and then she saw…

She froze.

Something had _moved_. 

“What?” Kitty hissed, and Lyn-Z pressed her finger to her lips. She stared down the hall, trying to pinpoint exactly where and what she’d seen.

Everything was motionless.

“What did you see?” Jimmy whispered.

“I don’t know,” Lyn-Z said. She didn’t want to look away, feeling as though whatever it was she’d seen would reappear the second her back was turned. “I thought I saw something move.”

“Something like a cute fuzzy critter or something like an undead killing machine?” Jimmy asked. “Because I will have a different reaction, depending.”

“I don’t know,” she said. She bit her lip. “It was too quick.”

She couldn’t even form a picture in her mind to any accuracy of what it had looked like. Just the impression of motion that left her feeling exposed.

She forged ahead, Kitty close behind. She was glad she’d replaced her gloves; she was pretty sure the gun would have slipped from her hands already, her hands were so sweaty. The dull yellow light seemed to wash away the worst of the shadows, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was walking straight into something terrible.

At the end of the hall was a fork. She stopped, looking at both options.

“Well, the one on the left definitely looks more foreboding,” Jimmy said. “It’s got kind of the ‘gonna pull out your teeth to shove them up your ass’ vibe to it.”

“The what?” Kitty said, then shook her head. “They’re both identical. It’s a crapshoot.”

“Then left it is,” Lyn-Z said. She thought both empty, dusty hallways looked pretty fucking foreboding and she didn’t want to spend any more time than they needed to standing still and thinking about things. It was ridiculous, but she kept thinking they were getting _stalked_.

Zombies didn’t have higher brain function, though. What made them dangerous was numbers, and there wasn’t any way that in this silent, sprawling building they were going to run into a riot of zombies unawares.

There had to be something else in here, and she didn’t have the beginning of an idea of what it could be.


	4. Chapter 4

“Left it is, towards murder and mayhem!” Jimmy chirped, louder than necessary. The words echoed down the hall and Lyn-Z tightened her grip on her gun.

There were goose bumps raised on the back of her neck, and she was strangely aware of every movement she made. She held her gun up in ready position, facing towards the ceiling, and every step down the hallway took effort.

She wasn’t going to stop. She knew she wasn’t, and that made it all the more difficult to put one foot in front of the other, to go deeper into the unknown.

To go further from the safety of the RV and the outside world.

She knew it was a bad fucking idea to wander around an abandoned government research facility, knew it with every squeak of her boots against the dirty floor, and yet here she was, too deep in to even think about turning back.

She didn’t bother looking back; she knew that the entrance was no longer visible.

Jimmy was being unnaturally quiet. He didn’t look rattled, but he was definitely keeping a sharp eye out. Kitty looked pale.

“What was that?” Kitty blurted out, spinning on her heel, knuckles going white where she was clutching her rifle.

“I didn’t hear anything,” Lyn-Z said, scanning the hallway. Nothing stood out as unusual – just dirt-caked green linoleum floors and the damned swinging yellow lights and walls that she thought had been white once.

Then she heard it. 

She whipped her head around to try to pinpoint the sound. It was coming from… she wanted to say behind them, but she really wasn’t sure.

It sounded sort of like _scratching_ , some sort of erratic, soft sound almost like someone dragging fingernails along a wall.

“What the fuck,” Jimmy said, “are there rats in the walls?”

“I hope,” Lyn-Z said, and Kitty just looked relieved that they could hear it, too.

The doors were labeled with strings of numbers and letters, and Lyn-Z thought that maybe they’d been a little naïve in thinking that they would be able to just find the lab and the mystery cure easily, even after all the foraging they’d done over the years.

Others had surely tried this before, and she didn’t really see much evidence that they’d been successful at their venture.

The further into the facility they got, the more certain Lyn-Z became that they were making a mistake.

Steve was too far away to help them, and more unsettled by his own wound than he was acknowledging, and she just wasn’t sure that, worst come to worst, they would manage to make it out of here.

But Chantal was a good person, and so was Mikey. They didn’t deserve the deaths that were creeping through their bloodstreams. And if any of them got bit…

It was really only a matter of time, with the way they were living. If they could find a cure in here, it could save them from losing each other. From dying themselves.

Something like that was worth the risk.

That’s what kept her moving deeper into the research facility.

“Stairs,” Jimmy said, pointing to the end of the hall. The door to the stairs had fire emergency information printed on a plaque next to it, and it looked like the last place she would like to go, especially given how creepy the ground level was. Going underground was asking for trouble.

But she let him take lead anyway, and they went downstairs. The stairwell smelled strange, like something had maybe died there a long, long time ago, leaving just the faintest of stenches.

They opened the door to another yellow-lit dusty hallway.

The hallway took a turn to the right, revealing a bunch of windowed rooms that held laboratory equipment.

“No fucking way,” Kitty breathed out.

“That was too easy,” Jimmy said, looking around suspiciously. “Where’s the terrifying monsters and mutant-forming goo?”

They hurried over to the lab door, fully expecting to find it locked. It swung open with the slightest touch.

This was almost more unnerving than the strange, quiet noises in the hall.

 

They went inside and each went to a filing cabinet, searching through the contents. 

Lyn-Z didn’t really know what she was looking for, figuring that she wasn’t going to find a folder labeled ‘magic zombie cure!’ but she flipped through anyway, looking for anything helpful.

In the second-to-last drawer she found a folder labeled “Project Tunguska.”

She pulled it out. At first the folder’s contents didn’t make any sense. It outlined the traits of a strange substance found in Siberia, of all places, and she flipped through the pages, pausing when she got to a photograph of a cat.

“Oh, ugh!” she said, realizing after a second that the cat in the image was dead, even though it was somehow propped up to appear like it was standing on a stainless steel surgical table.

“What?” Jimmy asked, still flipping through files. 

“There’s a picture of a dead cat in here,” she said. She flipped to the next page.

“Oh my god,” she said.

Jimmy and Kitty both looked at her.

“Oh my god,” she repeated.

The words blurred together, but the title across the top of the thin piece of paper remained the same.

_The Revival of Organisms: A Study._

There was a bunch of stuff, scientific mumbo jumbo that Lyn-Z didn’t have the patience to decipher, but phrases leaped out at her.

Fits of aggression.

Viable results in deceased humans.

 _Possible on a massive scale_.

Jimmy leaned over her shoulder, and she held open the report so he and Kitty could get a good glimpse.

“Wait,” he said. “Whoa, wait wait wait.”

Kitty stared at the date on the top corner of the page. “This was written twenty-three years ago.”

“They figured out how to bring back the dead,” Lyn-Z said blankly, staring at the neat lines of typed words. “They figured it out and then they used it on us.”

“But… I mean, _why_?” Kitty managed.

“This is fucked up,” Jimmy said. “This is seriously, seriously fucked up. I mean I knew we didn’t trust those fuckers but…”

“All those people… all that we all went through,” Lyn-Z said. “It was all us. It wasn’t some freak virus or whatever. It was fucking biological warfare on ourselves.”

She looked up and Jimmy and Kitty looked as shocked as she was. She’d never dreamed, not in a hundred years, that the government had been responsible for the way things were.

“Does it say anything about a cure?” Jimmy asked.

Lyn-Z flipped through the pages of the file, trying to find anything indicating there was a way of reversing the zombie process.

First she thought the answer might be barium, an element found to halt the spread of the spore. But then she realized that it only worked on dead tissue.

She found the answer on one of the first pages, where it described using the spore that they’d discovered in the dirt at the Tunguska site. _Radical healing properties_ , it read, describing how the spore when applied to wounds healed them with miraculous speed.

That had been the impetus for testing the compound on deceased tissue, she realized, understanding for the first time how the dead cat had been standing. Not propped up, but of its own accord.

The scientists had discovered how to reanimate the dead, and then it had all gone terribly awry. 

She turned to the final pages of the report, about how they’d been commanded to release the spore into the atmosphere. It didn’t say by who, and she didn’t have to read what the effect had been. 

“But why was there a new uprising?” she said aloud, flipping through the pages. 

Jimmy had hurried back to his filing cabinet and pulled out a new file. “Because they were planning on stopping the release of barium into the environment,” he said. “They thought the spore would have run its course. But it hasn’t, and without the barium to kill it…”

“They’ve fucked us over twice,” Kitty said. 

“Look in the cabinets,” Lyn-Z said. “Look for samples of the spore, this says it has healing properties.”

“Hair of the dog?” Jimmy said. “Sweet.”

They rifled through the cabinets and Kitty finally said “Ah-ha!” as she pulled out a bunch of vials. She wrapped them in cotton and shoved them in her knapsack.

Jimmy shoved the file he was reading in the knapsack, too, and Lyn-Z was closing the file she’d been reading to add to the loot when the lights flickered off.

A door slammed.

Jimmy let out a startled little scream, and Lyn-Z clutched the file to her chest.

“Fuck me backwards,” she gasped. “What the hell?”

The lights flickered on again, then off, erratic and increasingly unreliable, and she looked around the room, frantic.

The lab looked far more ominous now that it was mostly dark, the flickering light only serving to make it more terrifying.

Then Lyn-Z slowly realized there was something in the lab with them. It wasn’t making any noise, whatever it was – no breathing, none of the strange moaning zombies did – but she just had the _feeling_ that they were no longer alone.

She crammed the file into Kitty’s pack and scanned the room.

Nothing.

“Something’s here,” Jimmy whispered, then raised his voice. “Come out, come out, little piggy!”

A beaker tumbled to the floor and shattered.

Lyn-Z jerked out her gun and aimed it towards the shadows, watching carefully as the lights buzzed on for a second.

There was definitely a shape in the dark.

“Don’t be shy!” Jimmy called, voice strong. “Come on out here and let us see your pretty face!”

The thing didn’t move.

The lights flickered on, stayed on for a minute, and in the dull yellow light Lyn-Z could tell that something was _wrong_ with the shape of the creature. Something intrinsically _wrong_.

“Motherfucker ain’t got no head,” Jimmy hissed.

“It has to have a head,” Kitty said. “Everything has a head.”

“Heads are how you kill things,” Lyn-Z agreed. She didn’t look away from the corner. The creature was standing in the shadow of an opened cabinet, swaying slightly.

It probably just had its head at an odd angle. There was no way it was just walking around _headless_.

She fired a shot at it, the sound deafening in the enclosed space. Ears ringing, she tried to tell what damage she had done.

The creature was still standing there. It was swaying faster, but the bullet to its chest had had no effect.

Kitty fired the next shot, and this time Lyn-Z saw the creature’s body jerk with impact but then again, no reaction to getting shot.

“Creepy asshole’s dead,” Jimmy said. “I would say go for the head, but…”

“Maybe it’s harmless,” Kitty said hopefully.

“Yeah, because a harmless headless ghoul-monster is going to be wandering around an abandoned research facility,” Jimmy said.

Lyn-Z thought of one of the passages she’d seen on one of the last pages of the Project Tunguska file. _engineered to be impossible to kill_ …

“I think the scientists _made_ it,” she said.

“Who the fuck would make a headless zombie?” Kitty bit her lip.

“Someone looking to create an indestructible weapon,” Jimmy replied. “If they could train ‘em up bastards like that could be super-soldiers or some shit.”

Lyn-Z was still staring down the barrel of her gun at the creature when it _moved_ , faster than she would have thought possible. She didn’t have time to shoot, couldn’t pull her trigger finger back in time, just threw herself to the ground as the creature flung a metal tray at them, and she covered her head as glass rained down as it threw empty beakers at them, too.

She dared a glance to make sure Jimmy and Kitty were okay. They were on the ground too, and there was blood dripping down Jimmy’s forehead but they seemed alright. Jimmy aimed his rifle and fired a shot, but missed the creature as it ran towards them, arms raised. 

“Run!” Kitty yelled, and Lyn-Z scrambled to her feet, racing as fast as she could to the door of the lab.

She could see the creature out of the corner of her eye, moving lightning-fast and throwing tables and stools and abandoned laboratory equipment around the room with ferocity.

Jimmy reached the door first and struggled to get it open, finally flinging it open as Lyn-Z and Kitty reached him, letting them pass and then jerking the door shut behind himself .

The creature was still in the lab and slammed against the door. Jimmy kept his grip on it and Kitty reached in to help, making sure that the creature couldn’t get through.

The glass was apparently shatterproof; it held as the creature slammed into it again and again. 

“We have to fucking do something,” Jimmy said. “Block the door.”

“We have to kill it,” Lyn-Z said. 

“How?” Kitty said, breathless as she kept her white-knuckled grip on the door. Lyn-Z hoped it held; the creature was angry, fists pounding the glass as it threw itself against it.

She could see it clearly now for the first time. 

Its skin was a dull, grey color and Lyn-Z was unsure how it seemed to have halted the decay process. Perhaps some sort of chemical mummification, perhaps something in the process of creating it had allowed it to retain its minimal state of decay. The head – or lack thereof – was the most immediately drawing factor of its appearance. She couldn’t stop looking at the shoulders, the way they didn’t slope up into a neck, but rather went straight across, barring the section of neat stitches sealing off what had once been a neck neatly into something that looked almost natural.

It was a horrible version of Frankenstein’s monster, she thought. 

“Fire!” she said abruptly.

“I can’t really get a good shot right now,” Jimmy replied, concentrating on keeping the door held shut.

“No, we need to burn the fucker,” Lyn-Z said. “There are chemicals everywhere. Surely some of them are flammable.”

“What if this one isn’t the only headless wonder wandering around?” Jimmy asked.

“There were gas lines in the lab,” Kitty said. 

“Are you suggesting we blow this motherfucker sky high?” Jimmy asked with a wolfish grin.

“I thought you wanted us to keep massive property damage to a minimum,” Lyn-Z added.

“Yeah, well,” Kitty said, “that was before I knew there were headless corpses wandering around raging like someone just stole their pumpkin.”

Lyn-Z looked into the lab, past the creature. Sure enough there were the familiar little spouts for natural gas that she vaguely remembered from school chemistry labs.

A plan came to her quickly. She wasn’t sure if it would work, but it was worth a try.

“Okay, what we need to do is rig the door to hold for a little while,” she said, “and one of us needs to get in there and turn on the gas.”

“And?” Jimmy said.

“And then we rig up a bomb to go off when the Headless Horseman of the Apocalypse there breaks through the door,” she said. “Then, boom.”

“Sounds like the motherfuckin’ plan of the century,” Jimmy agreed. 

Lyn-Z found one of the windows that slid open – she figured it was something to make paper work easier to pass to a secretary, judging by the desk settled in front of it – and made sure the creature was still occupied with slamming into the door. It was. 

Must be pretty brainless after all.

She slid open the window and carefully swung her leg over the sill. The creature hadn’t noticed that she’d separated from the group and circled around. She wondered briefly how it even functioned, since it seemed to center in on their location with relative ease despite the fact that it definitely did not have eyes or ears.

She climbed to the floor as quietly as she could, then made the mad dash to the counters where she frantically twisted the gas levers on.

There was a hiss when she turned it. “Thank god,” she mumbled, hoping that she really was filling the room with gas instead of just air.

She gathered together what she needed and started to dash back for the window. Something was different, though.

The pounding had stopped and she could faintly hear Jimmy and Kitty screaming at her, “Move! Run! Hurry!”

She dove for the window, getting her top half through and dropping her bomb-making supplies across the hallway with a loud clatter. Kitty was there, jerking at her arms as Lyn-Z kicked and tried to get through the window.

The creature was _right there_ and she felt it grab onto her right leg. She screamed, kicking as hard as she could against the vice-grip that the creature had on her leg. She bucked up, struggling and screaming and desperate to break free, to get away.

There was a white-hot flash of pain as the stitches in her leg tore open as the creature’s fingers dug in. A warm gush of blood soaked her pant leg.

She twisted her hips and Kitty jerked her arms as hard as she could and with her bleeding leg she kicked the creature with every bit of rage she had left. Then she heard Jimmy say, “Hold still.”

She tried her best, unable to go completely limp, still kicking at the creature as best she could. She felt Jimmy standing close and then there was a reverberating thud of impact as he swung an axe and it embedded in the creature’s arm, inches away from her leg.

“Fuck,” she gasped.

The creature arched like it was screaming soundlessly in pain, and Lyn-Z used the distraction to jerk her leg free of its grasp.

She slid to the floor, Kitty still holding onto her arms and giving her a sense of comfort, despite the fact that the creature was still _right there_ and obviously madder than ever.

Jimmy managed to slide the window back shut - Lyn-Z cringed at the crunching sound the creature’s fingers made when they got caught between the window and the frame -- and they stumble-raced back to the door, Lyn-Z leaning against it as she frantically checked herself for damage.

She had the torn stitches, strange scratches where the creature had gripped her, like it had torn into her with its nails without her even realizing. Kitty ripped off a strip of her shirt to tie around her leg where the torn stitches were causing her pant leg to plaster itself to her skin with blood, and Jimmy gave her one of his shirts to tie around the scratches, which were just beginning to well up with blood and were stinging like a motherfucker.

Then they set to work rigging up the supplies they’d gotten to go off, turning the gas-filled lab into a ticking time bomb. She thought briefly of her stepdad, thankful that he’d worked on the demo crews that had formed after the first wave of cleansing, and how he’d sometimes let her come with him to watch him blow buildings up. She’d picked up a lot about improvising explosions, and it was a skill that came in really fucking handy more often than she would have dreamed.

Satisfied the room would blow, they took off, Lyn-Z stumbling along and holding onto them for support as they made it to the stairs and into the upstairs, knowing that the lab would blow at any minute.

They made it halfway down the corridor, nearly to the corner that would take them a straight shot towards freedom, when there was a loud _crash_ and the creature skidded into the hallway in front of them.

No, not _the_ creature, Lyn-Z quickly realized. She hadn’t heard an explosion. It was another creature.

She remembered the sounds from earlier. There was more than one of the monsters. They hadn’t been followed to the lab by the one creature, but rather had been stalked by at least _two_.

“We’re going to get fucking eaten by something without a mouth,” Jimmy babbled, eyes wide. “No, really, it’s going to turn us into breakfast. Eat us with its ass or something.”

Kitty aimed and took a shot at it, and Lyn-Z looked around and realized that to their left was a maintenance closet.

She hobbled over to it, safe enough from the barrage of gunfire Jimmy and Kitty were putting the creature through, and shoved open the closet door. Inside she found an aerosol can of _something_ that she prayed was flammable, and she stumbled back out, fumbling in her pocket for her lighter. She choked back a burst of inappropriate laughter when she realized it was Gerard’s lighter, that she’d never given it back to him in the RV. 

There was a good chance she was going to burn the shit out of her hand, but as long as she took the creature down with her she was cool with that. 

“Over here, asswipe!” she yelled, and lit the lighter and sprayed.

She felt only the briefest flash of heat before she got her hand out of the way, and her improvised flamethrower _worked_ , spitting fire straight out to catch the creature in the midriff. 

It flailed and she didn’t let up, re-igniting the spray again quickly before the creature attacked, this time catching it in the chest, right over where its heart should be.

The creature’s flesh was burning, filling the air with a familiar acrid smoke, and it ran around wildly, arms trying to shield its burning body from further attack. It raced in between her and Kitty, close enough that she could feel the heat, before it darted down the hall. Still burning, it finally stumbled to the ground, falling in a smoldering heap.

“Holy fuck,” Lyn-Z said, looking at the aerosol can and lighter still clutched in her red hands.

“I can’t believe that actually fucking worked,” Kitty said, staring at the twitching, smoking creature.

“You just crispy-crittered that monster,” Jimmy said, awed.

“That was so fucking awesome,” Lyn-Z said. She laughed. “Come on, let’s get out of this joint before it blows.”

They ran, Lyn-Z almost forgetting her injuries in the adrenaline rush. The sight of light shining at the end of the corridor was the best fucking thing she’d ever seen, and they had almost reached it when there was a dull-sounding _boom_ from behind them.

“The gas lines!” Kitty yelled, sounding terrified and thrilled.

“Quick!”

The hallway shook, plaster raining down on them, and they ran as quickly as they could, racing through the doors and into the RV, screaming, “Go! Go! Go!”

Steve looked at them, alarmed, and threw the RV into gear, careening away from the facility and speeding towards the gates.

Behind them there was a strange _fwoosh_ sound, and Lyn-Z covered her head on instinct, curled on the RV floor beside Jimmy and Kitty, door still swinging wildly open, and then there was a bone-shaking _boom_.

“Fuck!” Steve yelled, ducking his head low over the steering wheel, as behind them the facility exploded. “What the fuck did you guys get to do?”

Lyn-Z raised her head, looking at the burning building behind them, grin on her face. “That was fucking awesome.”

“We blew that fucker up!” Jimmy cheered, getting up and doing a victory dance. He pulled Kitty into it, and Lyn-Z propped herself up against the cabinet, finally feeling the pain of her lacerated leg as she watched the facility burn.

*

The drive back to Monroeville was strangely subdued.

After their initial burst of elation they settled into quietness, all of them unsure as to what to do with the information they’d found. Jimmy was mainly concerned with getting back to Chantal and finding out if the miracle cure would work on zombie bites, and Lyn-Z, flipping through the pages of the file, was hopeful that it would.

“You guys, what are we going to do?” Kitty finally asked, just before the broken fence of the city came into view. “We can’t just sit on this knowledge.”

“The government’ll kill our asses if we try to tell anyone,” Jimmy said.

“That sounds like a challenge,” Steve said. He looked strangely menacing with his bandana now, and Lyn-Z thought it was just the knowledge of what lay beneath it. “I think we need to let people know what’s what.”

“We have always wanted messages in our music,” Lyn-Z said. “Now we’ve got a motherfucker of one.”

“Brainwash the kids with the truth,” Jimmy said. “Sounds like our sort of thing.”

Kitty glanced around at them. “We’re gonna be in the middle of a shitstorm if this gets big enough.”

“Sweet!” Steve replied. 

Lyn-Z laughed, but stopped when Steve went a little pale, staring down at her leg. “What?” she began, but then looked down.

The makeshift bandage Jimmy had tied around her leg where the creature’s fingers had dug in had turned a dark, wet color, and when she’d shifted her leg while laughing a bright fresh bloodstain on the carpet was revealed.

“Shit,” she said. She’d been ignoring the pulsing pain radiating out from the injury out of old habit, the same way she did when she busted something up while performing, but seeing how much blood she was losing made it difficult to ignore any longer. “Those scratches aren’t deep enough to bleed like that.”

In the back of her mind she remembered what Mikey and Chantal’s wounds had looked like back in Monroeville, and like a horrific slideshow she flashed through all the other people she’d known and lost throughout the years, comparing what she could remember her injury looking like to theirs. She didn’t dare loosen the bandage to see if she had the tell-tale streaks of infection radiating out from the scratches.

“You didn’t get bit, did you?” Steve asked, voice pitched low. He glanced at Jimmy and Kitty up front. Kitty was making airy gestures with her free hand while smiling a lot, clearly trying to keep Jimmy’s mind off the question of whether or not the cure was going to work.

“No,” Lyn-Z said. “Fucker didn’t even have a mouth, just scratched me. It just… it just must have been deeper than I thought. It was a scary fucking experience.”

Steve didn’t look like he believed her, but he didn’t press the issue as he helped her clean up and replace her bandages. She didn’t look, but Steve didn’t say anything about infection. Afterwards she curled up on the bed and fell drifted to sleep, too exhausted to worry more about things she couldn’t change.

*

“So screwed!”

Lyn-Z groaned and pawed at the hand shaking her shoulder, and tried to block out what they were saying. “We’re so pants-on fucked right now, shit. Lyn-Z! Get up, you lazy ass!”

Lyn-Z managed to sit up, trying to filter the words through her sleep-bleary brain. “What?” she managed.

“They’ve set up a checkpoint,” Jimmy said. “Come on. Up and at ‘em, we’ve got to make sure things are on the up and up.”

“Nothing here is on the up and up,” Lyn-Z said numbly. Now that she was awake the pain in her leg was returning, a steady dull constant pain, not unlike growing pains. She remembered Mikey assuring Chantal that his wound had gone numb relatively soon after being attacked, and tried to use that to reassure herself that she wasn’t turning into the undead. It didn’t work.

“Think they’ve heard about the break in?” Steve asked. His visible eye was bloodshot, and she wondered how he was managing to stay upright. She suspected it had more to do with willpower than anything else.

“More likely they’re trying to keep the infected out of the city,” Jimmy said. “Remember how it was back during the first uprising?”

Kitty called back, “Looks like they’ve got sniffer dogs.”

Lyn-Z stared at her leg. Fuck. Dogs tended to have an uncanny ability to tell when a person was infected, and she could remember people getting denied access to not only buildings but cities themselves based on whether or not a dog had barked at them. 

Steve noticed what she was staring at and said, “You need to put on a pair of pants that don’t look like you’ve been put through a shredder. We’ll get you through, don’t worry.”

Lyn-Z nodded. She still felt fuzzy around the edges, and she wondered if that wasn’t because of lack of sleep, but rather her injury.

“Why would she worry?” Jimmy was asking as she stumbled to her bag. “She’s not dying.” 

“She got scratched by that creature,” Steve said. “Her leg looks _bad_.”

Lyn-Z felt too numb to offer something to make them feel better, even something as simple as, “I feel better now!”

She remembered Chantal and Mikey’s nonchalant attitudes, and wished that she could manage that sort of levity. She managed to put on a new pair of pants, loose enough that they didn’t dislodge her bandages as she pulled them up, just as their RV pulled up to the checkpoint.

“Everyone out!” called the officer, rapping on the door. 

“Fuck,” Kitty said, and tried to nudge the backpack with the files and the vials they hoped contained the cure under the table, before she hurried to the door. Lyn-Z followed, going down the steps gingerly but doing her best to look like she was just scared. 

There were two all-black German shepherds chained nearby, ears perked attentively as they watched the proceedings. 

Steve stood close to Lyn-Z’s side so she could lean on him if her leg gave out, and she was grateful for the gesture. The two officers surveyed them, looking them up and down as they awkwardly lined up in front of their battered RV. They look kind of like cartoon characters, one round and the other skinny.

“What brings you to Monroeville?” The round officer leaned back on his heels as he waited for an answer. 

“Trying to avoid getting our asses eaten,” Jimmy said casually, leaning in to peer at the officer’s nametag. “Officer Dewees.”

“Fair enough,” replied Dewees, which was a far more civil reply than Lyn-Z would normally expect from a government official. Usually they started out being a hard-ass and just went deeper and deeper into prick territory from there. 

The other officer – Rickly, his nametag said – peered through the windows of the RV. Lyn-Z hoped that there wasn’t anything too blatantly bloodstained sitting out in the open. She couldn’t remember if the clothes she’d stained at the facility were dark enough to hide the stains or not.

“Have any of you come in contact with the infected?” Dewees asked. He raised an eyebrow when they paused. 

“Not directly,” Kitty said, knowing perfectly well that there had to be zombie bits clinging to the front grill of the RV. Lyn-Z stayed quiet. She hadn’t looked in a mirror and had no idea how she looked, and didn’t want to risk drawing undue attention to herself.

Steve’s injury was more obvious, but he was clear of infection. He’d have collapsed already if he weren’t. She eyed the dogs warily, hoping that they wouldn’t condemn not only them, but Chantal and Mikey, waiting back at the hospital.

“Camper look clear?” Dewees called to Rickly. 

“Better take a look inside,” Rickly replied. “Last one was hiding an infected kid in the shitter.”

“Fuck,” Steve muttered under his breath. Lyn-Z didn’t elbow him – that would be suspicious – but she came damn close.

Jimmy made a big show of opening the door to the RV and announcing grandly, “Mi casa es su casa!”

Rickly disappeared inside while Dewees looked them over again. “You sure? Because I’ve got to let the dogs sniff you, and if they tell me you’re lying, I’ve got to snuff you.”

They all nodded. Lyn-Z tried to not look over her shoulder to see what Rickly was doing in there. If he’d found the backpack, or if he spotted their destroyed clothes. The RV wasn’t all that big. It wouldn’t take long for him to check it all the way through for stowaways.

Dewees ambled over to the dogs and said, “Dixie, your turn,” before untying the dog on the left and leading it over to them. 

Dixie sniffed at each of their shoes interestedly, and then sat down in front of Lyn-Z. Lyn-Z felt her stomach drop, and she stared as the dog whined softly. 

Dewees raised his eyebrow. “That’s a new one. These dogs either ignore you or try to eat you. What’s your story?”

Lyn-Z shrugged. “I cut my leg. She might smell the blood.”

Dewees didn’t look convinced. “Show me.”

Lyn-Z carefully leaned over, feeling the blood rushing to her head and hoping that she didn’t topple over, and rolled up her pant leg carefully. The bandage looked rough, but there was no fresh blood showing through it. Luckily, the torn stitches were lower on her leg than the scratches from the creature.

Dewees motioned for her to unwind the bandage. “How did you cut yourself?”

Lyn-Z only barely managed to stop herself from saying, “Shaving.” Instead she told him she'd fallen. 

The cut looked uglier than it had before she’d gone to sleep, but she was grateful to see that there were no tell-tale red lines of infection spreading out from it. She held her breath as Dewees glanced at it. He scrunched up his face in disgust, but looked to Dixie, who showed no signs of attacking Lyn-Z.

He told her she could put the bandage back, and she did, awkwardly, as Rickly ambled out of their RV, holding a dark bundle.

“Found some bloody clothes,” he announced. Lyn-Z couldn’t tell if he was holding the backpack filled with the cure and files or not. He was holding it close to his chest. “Weapons. Looks like they saw some action.”

Dewees replied, “They’ve got an injury. Looks clean.”

Dixie wagged her tail.

Lyn-Z held her breath. Kitty began to try to explain what’d happened, clearly having spent her time coming up with a fabricated tale of how they’d gotten roughed up, but Rickly shushed her.

“I found this in there,” he announced, holding out what he’d carried off the RV.

It wasn’t the backpack. It was a marching uniform jacket. It took Lyn-Z a moment to realize it must have been Frank’s, that someone must have helped him out of it while she had been distracted with Gerard.

She felt light-headed; not only were they going to get taken in, but they’d fucked over the Black Parade too. All that they’d survived and it was for fucking _nothing_ because of some goddamn government official snooping in their RV.

Dewees looked shocked, which was the last expression she would have ever expected to see on an officer’s face. “Is Frank okay?”

He sounded _concerned_. Lyn-Z didn’t know what to think.

“He’s okay,” Jimmy said warily. “Little bitty bit broken, no big deal.”

“How do you know him?” Rickly asked with marked suspicion. 

Lyn-Z was beginning to understand how the Black Parade managed to play so many shows in one town.

“We were hanging out when shit went down,” Steve explained airily. “We’re trying to get back there. Help out. You know. Be good fucking Samaritans.”

Dewees didn’t look like he believed them, but looked down at Dixie, who was still wagging her tail, and nodded to Rickly.

Rickly nodded back and announced, “You can go on through.”

They didn’t waste any time getting back in the RV, but before they got waved past, Rickly and Dewees seemed to be conferring about something, and then Dewees tapped on the driver’s side window. Kitty rolled it down.

“If you get stopped again, don’t let them know you came through a checkpoint,” he said. “Got it?”

Kitty nodded.

“Be careful,” he said and winked. Lyn-Z glanced back, and the backpack with the cure in it was open, sitting on top of the table. She opened it up, but everything was still inside.

“Holy fuck,” Steve said. 

“People on the motherfucking inside,” Jimmy confirmed. “We’re in fucking _deep_.”

*

On the drive through Monroeville back to the warehouse district they passed squads doing everything from incinerating the undead to herding together ragtag groups of survivors. Lyn-Z wondered how it had taken them so long to arrive, especially since she now knew that they were fucking _responsible_ for it. The black vans driven by the cleansing crews were the most ominous, filled with hard-featured soldiers looking straight ahead as they drove slowly through the corpse-littered streets.

All those kids had died just because someone had decided to stop releasing a chemical into the air. Lyn-Z wrapped her arms around herself. The world seemed smaller, somehow, and an infinitely colder place now that she knew the root of the zombie problem. It was no less terrifying than thinking that the dead had just reanimated for no good reason, and even the revelation that it was a scientific catastrophe rather than a paranormal one provided no comfort.

When Lyn-Z tried to stand up to look in the file again, hoping to see if there was something they’d missed, she stumbled. It was only then that she realized her leg had gone numb. She caught herself just in time and straightened up, able to stand still once she concentrated on it. She didn’t know how she’d managed to forget that her leg was supposed to be radiating pain, how she hadn’t noticed the change, but now it was all she could focus on.

Zombie bites were supposed to go numb. That was how you knew how far the dead tissue was progressing, how much living tissue remained. Lyn-Z’s scratch was progressing at a different rate than the normal zombie bite, a fact which settled into a knot of cold fear in her belly.

What if the cure didn’t work? 

And if it worked for Chantal and Mikey, what if it couldn’t stave off Lyn-Z’s infection? What if something different was happening to her, something that even the supposed miracle cure couldn’t mend?

She rested a hand over the injury and took a deep breath. Soon. They would know soon.

They were all strangely quiet as they approached the makeshift hospital. Jimmy was wringing his hands, an act that he didn’t seem conscious he was doing as he stared out the window, brow furrowed.

There were fewer and fewer government vehicles as they got to the warehouse district, and none of them seemed interested in pulling over a beat-up RV when the undead were still wandering the streets. She caught glimpses of uniformed people attempting to reconstruct the fence, though the majority of their energy seemed to be preoccupied with taking down the zombies that kept lurching towards the living.

When they pulled up outside the makeshift hospital, Jimmy looked at them all with one of the most serious, determined expressions she’d ever seen on them, and he solemnly said, “Thank you. Even if it doesn’t work…”

Kitty wrapped him in a hug, and Steve hit him lightly on the back of the head as Lyn-Z held out the backpack. “Let’s see if it does.”

The makeshift hospital was now teeming with more people than ever. Lyn-Z shuffled alongside Steve. Without any feeling in her leg, she felt as though she might fall over at any moment, so it felt as though she were moving at a glacial speed. By the time they got to the quarantine room Jimmy was already kissing Chantal over and over, short, disbelieving kisses in between exclamations of, “It’s going to work, it’s going to.”

Mikey was struggling to sit up, watching them avidly as his band crowded around Kitty demanding information. He looked much, much worse than he had when they’d left – there was a grey tinge to his pallor that made Lyn-Z think that he didn’t have all that long left.

Gerard looked over as she and Steve entered the room, brow furrowed as he took in her appearance. He too looked far more haggard than he had when she’d last seen him – he had a black eye and a busted lip, and beyond that he was too-pale, with deep circles under his eyes.

Steve helped her down on a pallet and started cutting her pant leg away, peeling it back and pulling off her boot to reveal the damage done to her leg.

“Eww,” they both said, squinting at the mess. It looked almost like it had rotted, faint red streaks radiating out, and she wondered what kind of freaky government-invented secret chemicals had seeped into her bloodstream from the creature’s infected touch. She felt dizzy, like she was on a tilt-a-whirl and the rest of the room was spinning wildly around her. She held tight to Steve’s hand and tried to focus on Kitty, on the cure.

To see if she stood a chance.

Kitty took a vial out of her knapsack, carrying it carefully over to Chantal and carefully applying it to her wound. Chantal chewed on her lip, looking as though she almost wasn’t even going to dare hope that this was really going to fix her. Even from Lyn-Z’s distance she could tell that Chantal was far worse off as well. Her eyes looked as though they had sunk in her face and she was shaky and frail.

Gerard was standing on tip-toes watching. Jimmy was holding Chantal’s good hand tightly as they both watched the bite as Kitty dabbled the vial’s contents on it, then pulled away, still holding the vial tightly in one hand.

“How long does it take?” Chantal said nervously.

“Not a clue,” Kitty said.

Everyone watched Chantal’s arm. No one seemed to even be breathing.

“Are there fewer red streaks?” Jimmy asked, leaning in close. 

“It kind of looks like it,” Chantal said, squinting at her arm. “But I don’t know if I’m just hoping or what.”

“A watched pot never boils,” Steve said. He looked back down at Lyn-Z’s leg. “Zoid, I hate to say it but I think you definitely caught the zombie-cooties.”

“I did not,” Lyn-Z said, more out of reflex than anything. The alarming red streaks spiraling out from where the creature’s fingers had dug in appeared to be more pronounced by the minute. She tentatively prodded at the wound and couldn’t hold in the gasp at the sharp pain, a shocking sensation in her otherwise numb leg.

Gerard was suddenly at her side, staring down at her leg in horror. “What the fuck happened?” he asked.

“I got a little too close to a headless super-zombie,” Lyn-Z replied. “Turns out it wasn’t as harmless as I maybe thought.”

She felt light-headed and told herself firmly that the cure was going to work. It had to. Chantal and Jimmy were still staring at Chantal’s arm, and Kitty had gone over to Mikey and was talking to him quietly.

Lyn-Z couldn’t quite focus on the room.

She missed the uncertainty, the faint hope that she was could be okay. She bit her lip, waiting to hear someone cheer. Waiting to see if Chantal was okay, if Mikey was okay, because that meant she might survive, too.

Then Steve took her hand and said, “Maybe we should chop it off. You know, to be safe.”

“You just don’t want to be the only person in the band missing a part,” Lyn-Z said, feeling more anchored already, just from contact and the familiarity of banter.

Gerard reached out and tentatively took her other hand. “Thanks for finding the cure for my brother.”

“We don’t exactly know if it works yet,” Lyn-Z said. She looked away from her leg. “Though I really, really fucking hope it does.”

“It’s going to work,” Gerard said with confidence, like it was the only option left, believing, and then he leaned in and pressed a hand to her cheek. “Thank you.”

And he kissed her, his lips soft against hers. 

She felt Steve let go of her hand, could hear him mumble, “Stupid freaking lovebirds, gonna give him zombie-cooties, Zoid, watch out,” but she just pressed her now-free hand to Gerard’s cheek, fingertips against his hair.

He pulled back, the kiss never anything but gentle and sweet, and Lyn-Z smiled at him. “You’re welcome,” she said. 

Gerard opened his mouth to say something – an apology, it looked like, from his guilty expression – but he was interrupted by Chantal cheering, “Oh my ever-loving goodness check this shit out!”

She was holding out her arm, which looked…

It looked a hell of a lot better than it had five minutes ago.

“Is it just me or is that big fucking zombie bite disappearing?” Mikey asked, grinning hard. He pulled the blankets away from his infected leg and stared at it hard. “Come on, shazam, be zombie-free!”

Kitty poured a little more of the spore-compound on his leg and said, “Holy crap, it’s actually working!”

Chantal was cheering, lifting her arms in the air and pumping her fists excitedly. The bite on her arm was nearly gone, now reduced to just red marks on her pale skin.

Mikey too was looking better, now just pale instead of ghostly-looking, and Gerard squeezed Lyn-Z’s hand tight before hurrying to his brother’s side.

“Hey Kit-kat,” Steve called. “Can I get a miracle cure for the pyro-Zoid?”

“Coming right up!” Kitty said cheerfully. Lyn-Z watched the gory scratches on her leg fade away as the cure worked its magic, and tried to not think too hard about the fact that she had the same zombie-creating spore in her leg as had caused the entire mess to begin with.

“And after we know it’s safe and she’s not going to turn into a raving psychopath, we can try my eye,” Steve said, winking at her.

“I don’t think it regenerates flesh,” Lyn-Z said, sticking out her tongue. “But at least I won’t try to eat yours.”

“Nope, you want to eat someone else’s,” Jimmy called across the room, and Lyn-Z tried to resist the impulse to hide her head under the blanket.

But Gerard grinned at her, and she couldn’t help the grin that spread across her face in reply.

*

Lyn-Z wasn’t sure how she managed to drift off, but somehow she must have. She woke slowly, blinking in the dim room, disconcerted. She kept thinking, _this isn’t the RV_ , until the sleep-fog cleared enough that she could recognize the makeshift hospital and the voices around her.

“And they saw it?” Gerard was saying. She blinked a few more times, clearing the bleariness of sleep out of her eyes. He was holding one of the files from the facility open across his lap, knuckles white on the hand he had fisted against the arm of his chair.

“Rickly did,” Jimmy confirmed. “Didn’t say anything though, just brought out Frank’s jacket and let us go.”

Lyn-Z struggled to sit up. She felt strange, though she couldn’t quite put her finger on what was wrong. She took in her surroundings; it was dim and they were reading by lantern. Chantal was sleeping. Jimmy had a hand loosely resting on her ankle like he couldn’t quite believe she was there beside him, alive and breathing. 

Frank was leaning in, peering at the file in Gerard’s lap. “What’s this about immediate results on putrefied flesh?”

“That’s about the zombies, we need to find the shit about the side effects of the spore itself on living tissue,” Gerard replied. He was hunched over, straining to make out the typed reports in the dim light.

Lyn-Z pushed the blankets down. Her leg was unmarred. She traced her fingers over it, but she couldn’t feel any raised tissue, residual warmth, anything. There was no trace of the scratch marks or of the infection.

She pinched herself lightly, and she could feel the sensation. It was hard to wrap her head around the idea that she wasn’t injured anymore, that she wasn’t dying, and that they’d actually found a motherfucking _cure_ for the zombie infection.

She stood unsteadily, and Steve turned and noticed her for the first time. “Hey, you need to sleep,” he admonished.

“Like hell,” Lyn-Z replied, and made her way over. “Found the list of side effects yet?”

“Yeah, it turns you into a stubborn motherfucker,” Steve told her. 

“So far it’s just said that few effects were reported,” Kitty said, glaring at Steve. 

“What the hell?” Frank suddenly burst out, jabbing his finger at the page Gerard was reading. “Is that talking about what I think it’s talking about?”

Gerard’s hand was shaking as he passed the file to Jimmy. “What do you think?”

“I think this is bullshit,” Frank practically shouted. “I knew we couldn’t trust the fuckers!”

Lyn-Z joined Steve and Kitty in leaning over Jimmy’s shoulders to see what had rattled Frank and Gerard so badly.

The only word that stood out to Lyn-Z was _vaccine_ , centered and underlined. She leaned in closer, and the paragraph seemed to imply…

Seemed to imply that the vaccine had been produced twenty-three years ago. Three years before the spore had even been introduced to the public, before any zombies had risen. She read quickly, and found that high-ranking government officials, military leaders, and even special squadrons of soldiers had all been immunized before the plague even began.

“Fuck,” she breathed out. This erased any doubt that the infection that had killed so many people, that had completely restructured their country and turned their world into the nightmare that it was, had been an accident of some sort. It had been premeditated, and the government itself had made the decision of who to keep alive.

Jimmy turned the page, and on the next page was a list that didn’t make any sense. Lyn-Z spotted Monroeville on it, and then finally read the bold type at the top. _Facilities Successfully Producing Next-Level Operatives_.

Soldiers that couldn’t be killed by anything short of incineration. The creature they’d fought in the facility.

Lyn-Z went numb as she realized how far-reaching the plan was, how many monsters were still lurking in the shadows. Waiting. 

How many more horrors could still be unleashed on the populace.

“We’ve got to tell people,” she said.

Gerard looked up, caught her eye.

“We can’t just sit on this,” she said again, waving her hand at the file. “Fuck. People have to _know_.”

“We’ve already got audiences,” Gerard said. Frank nodded. He kept clenching and unclenching his fists, like he wanted to smash something. Lyn-Z felt the same.

“And not just here,” Jimmy said. “We’ll have to travel. Stay ahead of the man.”

Kitty nodded. “We’re already pretty good at it, but if we go for this, we’re going to have to go big. This shit… this is for _real_.”

“We know some people,” Frank said, and Lyn-Z thought of Dewees and Rickly at the checkpoint, and wondered what other connections they’d made in the area.

“Mikey’s got a… a friend in office near Chicago,” Gerard said. “I don’t know what he knows. Maybe he’ll help.”

“At least help get a blind eye turned on us,” Steve said. “For long enough for us to get the word out.”

“I always knew those government bastards were up to no good,” Jimmy said. 

“Fuck ‘em,” Frank agreed. Gerard nodded, the determined set of his chin matching the steely resolve in Kitty’s eyes, in the set of Steve’s shoulders, in Jimmy’s narrowed eyes.

Lyn-Z could feel the fear already changing into excitement, the thrill of knowing that they weren’t just going to accept things the way they were. Her grin felt bright-sharp in the flickering light of the lanterns as she said, “Let’s take down the motherfuckers.”

 

THE END.


End file.
